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Booting hangsGreetings, I am trying to install Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r1. I burned the XXX.iso into a CD. When I try booting from the CD, I get a message "Booting from CD: " and then the system hangs. I have used the same computer and drive to install other OS. What am I doing wrong? I read some of the earlier posts and I noticed people advising that certain drives should be disabled. I don't know how to issue those commands, so I have not been able to try that approach. Also, the image that I burnt was the full CD #1. Finally, when I look at the contents of the image that I have burnt, I see many different files, including help files and all. Is the BIOS smart enough to navigate to the correct directory and know the starting point for booting? This is obviously a post by someone very inexperienced and that is all the more reason why I need your help. Thanks, Bookmark/Search this post with: 
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Booting hangs
What computer do you have?
If it's a desktop, can you borrow a CD drive from another computer to do the install?
People have problems with SATA CD drives, bad CD drives, etc. Also, if you have a USB memory stick there may be an option for a bootable USB installer or net installer.
All the BIOS should do is recognize the disc as bootable and load the bootloader. The bootloader should then use BIOS calls to read the next part from the disc. In principle, everything should work until the kernel is loaded and initialized - then there is no more access to the BIOS and if something goes wrong the system will just hang.
If you press a button like the space bar maybe 2 times a second while the boot is proceeding, do you get a GRUB message and a prompt?
Booting hangs
I have tried on Dell desktop. Unfortunately, I don't have access to another drive.
How can I check if the disc is bootable? I downloaded the iso using wget and then burned the CD using Nero.
Is the bootloader in the .disk folder? I pressed spacebar as you suggested. But still nothing happens. The system shows these 2 messages:
Booting from CD:
ISOLinux 3.31 Debian 2007-2-14
It waits there for a few seconds and goes back and restarts the computer.
Booting hangs
Your CD is attempting to boot but somehow getting stuck and causing a reboot. The more common problems are:
1. faulty CD (or faulty .iso image). You need an 'md5sum' tool to calculate the md5 hash of your downloaded .iso file and compare the result with the md5 hash posted on the website that you got the iso from. It would also be convenient to get an md5 sum of your CD, but you need Linux (or UNIX) to do that; I don't know of any WinDos tools to get the md5 sum of the CD.
2. buggy BIOS. Check your BIOS settings. Try to turn off stuff you don't immediately need (serial port, parallel port, ethernet). Make sure you make a list of the changes you're making because you may have to go back to the defaults later. You need to make sure "legacy" support is on for disks, CDs, and if you use USB mouse and keyboard you need legacy emulation on them too.
3. buggy motherboard: Some motherboards have a huge list of bugs, but I'd still expect to get past the "ISOLinux" message and get a prompt so I can control exactly how the installer boots.
Use 'google' and see if you can find other posts about installing Etch on your model of Dell.
Installation Issues
I did check the MD5 and it was downloaded correctly. One question that I had was after I download the ISO, do I burn it as a bootable CD? Or should burning using the CD image option be good enough? I use Roxio/Nero to burn.
Installation Issues
The "burn CD image" option should work since the iso image should have been prepared as a "bootable" image. In principle you shouldn't be able to access the "make bootable" when burning from ISO - it wouldn't make sense because your boot stuff in the iso would be overwritten by something else.
Its the darn drive!
Yeah! issue resolved. Thanks for your help.