I have a demisnion dell XPS P100c computer with 32 megs of ram; a 1 gig and a 5 gig hard drive.
When ever I try to boot of a cd to install linux; I get an error: Missing OS. I have formated both hard drives creating a primary and logical drives, with the fdisk utility on a floppy version of windows 95. I really need help. What should I do?? :eek:

Make sure in the BIOS that you have the computer set to boot from CD... it looks like it is trying to boot from the harddisk which of course has nothing on it since you used fdisk

That was the first thing that I checked. With "boot from CD" enabled, all my computer does is stay at the startup scrn... (with device info, such as harddrives, floppy device, and computer info).
I acutally got the dos coppied onto the hard drive with the help of some other threads posted, but the C:\> prompt doesn't show up either. It just sits at the screen.
I've checked the cd's in my main computer and they all work fine. I am trying to get a flavor of linux onto it, and I've used the checksum as well.
Thanks in advace!

Well it seems like you are doing everything correctly... I'm not all that familiar with Linux (although I would really like to learn about it and use it) so there might be something specific that needs to be done that I don't know about...

Hopefully someone else here can help, also!

Good luck!

Does the linux boot disk work in other machines as a boot disk?

I only ask cause I once downloaded Linux and copied the iso to a CD but didn't create the CD using the ISO! Needless to say it didn't work.

If it does work in other machines, do you have any other bootable cd's to try in this machine (98 onwards work in windows) just to make sure it is actually trying to boot from CD?

Good luck

Yes, the cds boot on my other machine. The only other cd I've tried booting form was a Red Hat cd, which I got form the library. This cd came with the Red Hat Linux bible.
Other than that, I have no other cds that I can boot from.

Either your cd drive is not bootable (or faulty), or the sequence is wrong - If neither of the bootable cd's work in your system but work in others the system is setup wrong somehow. "Missing operating system" is the system trying to boot from one of your blank hard drives.

Go back into your bios and check the boot sequence and make sure the CD rom drive is before the hard disk drive.

If everything looks OK in the bios, whip the CD rom out of your other system and temporarily plug it in - in place of the current one. Older CD rom drives couldn't boot themselves. But I think it's the sequence myself :)

I tired that. I don't get to put the secuence in order, persay, but I have to choose either CD, Diskett, or HD first.

I'm kind of desperate to get an OS onto it, but the C:> drive was fomatted in FAT16. I don't know if this hinders anything, but I've been trying to take linux of the cd through dos. I can get to the drive (which is R:\ ) but I don't know how to extract the installer.

Any insight you can give is greatly appreciated

I don't think your computer will boot from Cd at all. Here's what I would do:

Take one of the HDD's out (biggest) and install it into your other system. Install Linux onto this HDD using that system and then when finished transfer the hard drive back to the original machine an boot from that. I don't know much about Linux or whether it will re-detect the different hardware but you haven't lost anything trying (except time!).

Let us know how you get on!

First I would like to thank everyone for all the help they contributed.
I solved one of my problmes by using the dos utility "rawrite" to put an image onto a floppy.
Then I booted from that floppy and took the data off the CD. All went well and I now have a fully functioning RedHat computer. I still do not know why my CD drive will only boot of certain cds. I think its because its old and finally going. Oh well. I did what I set out to do so thanks again.

I'm so glad you found a solution. It's so good that all these experts were here to help!

I remember when working with some of my older CD drives (from the mid 90's I think) they sometimes gave me trouble, also... would only read certain CDs, or would just plain take forever to work correctly or load. Good luck and have fun with your system!