[SOLVED]--2010 release - current release: upgrading issues

[Usehername]

What pinoc is saying is that what you need to do to verify that the CD is valid is to put it in the drive on your Mac and enter the command that he supplied.  "md5 fullname-version.iso".

This is not going to do anything to your Mac, it will simply try to pull the md5sum off and you then will need to compare it with what it is supposed to be.

I don't know what version you are trying to install so I don't know what the md5sum is supposed to be but it can be found wherever you downloaded from.

I hope I am not confusing you more.    

Thanks, Rudge! That was dumbed-down enough to make sense to me!

BAD BURN! It had all the files and appearances, but the terminal command said it didn't work.

Hurrah! Good to know. I guess I'll have to convince the boyfriend to download and burn a distro for me since I can't figure out why it didn't work on my macbook.

[Usehername]

If you are trying to boot the new ISO, that photo show it is doesn't boot.
Instead it show the boot of the already installed PCLOS 2010, clearly corrupted ...

When you will be able to boot from LiveCD, as first thing run "mediacheck" this will assure that your media is good!

Thanks, AS! Now that I know it was a bad burn I have so much more hope!! I will persist!

[Usehername]

I bought DVD+Rs because they held 4.7GB while the CDs were too small for the 689MB distro.

Was that my mistake? Is there a reason why DVDs wouldn't work? I thought DVD v. CD was just a labeling signal to ensure that people noticed the size restrictions.

[Old-Polack]

I bought DVD+Rs because they held 4.7GB while the CDs were too small for the 689MB distro.

Was that my mistake? Is there a reason why DVDs wouldn't work? I thought DVD v. CD was just a labeling signal to ensure that people noticed the size restrictions.

What kind of CDs are you buying? Standard is 700 MB, and release images are made to fit within that space.

[Usehername]

I bought DVD+Rs because they held 4.7GB while the CDs were too small for the 689MB distro.

Was that my mistake? Is there a reason why DVDs wouldn't work? I thought DVD v. CD was just a labeling signal to ensure that people noticed the size restrictions.

What kind of CDs are you buying? Standard is 700 MB, and release images are made to fit within that space.

I read in some "Linux rules" that there should always be extra space for files to temporarily sit and move around, but I guess I misapplied that rule in the wrong context.

Maybe I just need to go and buy the CDs.

[Neal ManBear]

  Rule to leave room? Once the CD is burned, it is "set." There is no moving around. When you boot from the CD, the files on it are loaded into RAM in order for the OS to run.     

[Usehername]

Solved! My macbook's CD/DVD drive has issues; boyfriend burned me a fresh version and it's running beautifully on the desktop.

Thanks ever so much to @pinoc, @Rudge, @NealManbear, @AS, @OldPolack for your patience and guidance! Even though it was a simple problem, I learned a lot in the process of trying to solve it.

For the record, Rudge's advice [see below] was new information to me (the whole time I assumed that I had permanently corrupted my computer when playing with the settings in root). Perhaps this can go into the FYI noobs section a little more clearly (or maybe it was there and I somehow missed it in my readings).

If you are not getting that far into the boot process, I would suspect

a) Your "CMOS" is not configured to try the CDROM as first boot location,

b) A bad burn, or

c) A hardware failure.