cd not found

[strawberry]

i installed redhat 5.2 a while back with no problems
i reformatted and have now decided to install 7.1, i made a boot floppy
but when i restart with the floppy and cd in place it says that no redhat cd can be found
before i installed from one cd, but this version has 9, the actual os is on 2 cds, another has source code and the rest is software, do i have to make more than one boot disk?
am i doing something wrong or have i got a dodgy cd?
im completely new so if anyone can help please do

[Pras]

I'm not familiar with RH, but do you have an option to select your cd drive during the boot process? You may have to specify it before it can find the cd.

[strawberry]

yes i went into the bios and changed the boot sequence before i started, i even tried to boot straight from the cd rom not the floppy but i have win nt and it just overrides it, how can i force my pc to boot from the cd rom?

[bdg1983]

tried to boot straight from the cd rom not the floppy but i have win nt and it just overrides it

Are you saying you CAN boot from cd, but the installation overwrites your nt partition?

I think I've heard that the server install will overwrite all partitions. If you select expert mode, then you should have control on what partitioning is done.

Booting from floppy is mainly for those that do not have bootable cdroms and will just startup the installer the same as booting directly from the cd.

[strawberry]

no what i meant was that windows ignores the fact that i want to boot from my cd-rom and just starts up
i have installed 5.2 now, i think that the 7.1 version i had was maybe scrathched slightly or had files missing so it wouldnt work, now i will change the 7.1 where i bought it then upgrade
thanks for the help anyway

[bdg1983]

It must be a bad cd.

If you set the boot order for cd first and a boot record cannot be found on the install cd, then it will skip to the next boot device specified in the bios. That would be the hardrive (NT) in your case.