CLOSED: Unable to boot into Fedora or ExpressCD for installation

[armorer1984]

Here is my problem. I am setting up a HDA for a friend. I have had my HDA running for years and have had very few issues.

I am unable to boot from any disc with Fedora. Period. I am able to boot the machine with Clonezilla and Gparted just fine. Fedora, not possible. I have tried using the Amahi Express 7.1 CD, the Fedora 32 and 64 bit discs, have tried making USB sticks and booting from those, all to no avail. The computer looks at the media containing a bootable copy of Fedora and after about 20 seconds boots into Windows7. The bootable media works in my other machine just fine, but not this one.

Things I have done:

-- Checked the SHA256 checksums on the Fedora 19 32 and 64 bit .iso's. They match. Verified the DVD data was an exact match after burning. Verification successful.

-- Checked the MD5 checksum on the Amahi 7.1 ExpressCD .iso. Checksum matches. Verified the DVD data was an exact match after burning. Verification successful.

-- Changed the BIOS to boot from CD/DVD first, USB second, hard drive third. Tried unplugging the HDD with Windows 7 to make absolutely sure it was looking for the CD/DVD/USB first. All I got was an error that there was no bootable media. Even tried forcing it to look at the removeable media during boot by F12 and selecting whichever media I was trying. It would wait about 20 seconds and give an error to "Remove media and reboot".

-- Tried changing the BIOS to "OS Install Mode" which limits the RAM to 256MB. No change, but thought I would give it a try anyway.

What am I missing here? I have done everything I can think of to make this thing work and after 2 days I am still hitting a brick wall.

[bigfoot65]

Could it be that the machine cannot read DVDs?

Clonezilla and GParted are both CDs.

The Express DVD does not work well from USB flash drives for most users. Recommend you check out the unsupported Fedora 19 USB install guidance. I have tested it many times with no failures.

[armorer1984]

I tried both drives, one is a dvd-rom, the other is a dvd burner. I followed the instructions as far as I could as the Fedora 19 DVD would not boot on the target machine. It would boot on my other machines, just not the one I want to actually install it on.

[bigfoot65]

Could be an issue with the DVD drive. I had that happen once.

Try the USB guidance I posted previously.

[armorer1984]

I finally have it installed. It took using the Fedora LiveUSB tool to get it to boot. Unetbootin just couldn't get it done for one reason or another.

Thanks for the help!

[bigfoot65]

Glad you finally got it sorted out. Seems every machine is different.