On 05/13/2014 01:42 AM Joshua Anthony wrote:
My apologies to those who feel that I have wasted their time and thanks to those who have tried to help. I don't know how I managed to start two threads but this whole business well illustrates the confusion that I originally wrote about. The 'technical' question was 'Why does exactly following the process that has worked perfectly well for other distros, using exactly the same hardware, fail when I try to install Debian the same way?' The confusion was - and is - how do I separate my rather elementary and unsophisticated question from the mass of expert questions from sophisticated users so as to get an answer I can understand without irritating them and wasting their time? That, I suppose, is a 'procedural' question, and I probably ought to have asked it separately. I'm happy to drop this now, as it certainly hasn't worked for me, and look elsewhere for answers. Josh.
Josh,Yes, problems generally don't come one at a time, but rather in bunches bundled and/or layered together.
Though I haven't been able to watch your screen during the process, I suspect that the failure to get your CDs to work was due to the way they were created. There are (at least) two ways your ISO file could be written to a CD: one is as a file, the other as an disk image. The first is the wrong way and, I've found, most CD-burning software is ambiguous about how a file (which is an ISO) is to be written, resulting is just the problem you've been having.
You can test my theory by using some software to look first at an install CD you know to be good and examining its files and directory structure. Then do the same for one (or more) or your failed CDs. At the top level the files and directories should be pretty much the same (as these are very much standardized). If instead on your failed CD you see somewhere your ISO file listed as a file, then the software you used to write the ISO did it the wrong way.
To increase your chances of burning the CD properly, try using K3b. Its menu text is more clear about what it's going to do and, IIRC, even mentions "ISO" in the correct menu item.
Personally, I most often use a series of commands issued from a terminal to burn a CD or DVD. I prefer this method because it's completely unambiguous what's going on. But that's a longer story and, as I gather from your previous posts, you prefer a GUI app. So instead of going there, I'll just recommend K3b. I'm pretty sure it will get you where you want to go.
hth, ken