Could you be a little more specific?
 
At what point did you have the problem. During the boot or once the distro tried to come up?
 
What exactly happened?
 
Can you tell us what distro and version of a live cd that you are using? Knoppix 3.3, Mepis.....?

The distro is called Move and is a special version of Mandrake. It comes with a book by David Brickner called "test driving linux", published this year by O'REILLY. It only works from the disk and cannot be loaded onto the hard drive. I've tried two ways to get it going. 1 - Quickly inserting the disk on starting up the computer.
2 - Clicking 'Restart' on the Windows close-down menu and again quickly inserting the disk before windows can restart. This is what happens: The startup splash screen appears; I press 'Enter'; a thermometer-type image appears with the message "Loading part 1"; the same again with "Loading Part 2" and then again with "Loading part 3". Then the screen goes blank; a small rectangle appears, floating around the screen rather like a screensaver but saying "Video mode not supported."
 
That's as much as I can tell you. I hope it makes some kind of sense to you. Thanks for showing interest

Try turning off plug n play in in BIOS before booting
the live CD.
Before you scratch up your CD, start your computer as
usual then put the CD in the drive and reboot.One small
scratch in the wrong place can make the disk unusable.

Thanks Mel. That seems to work. I can now get almost as far as the desktop and then I get a message saying "Could not read network connection list. Please check that "dcopserver" program is running'
I have no idea what that means or how to do it.
Should this problem go as a new topic? Sorry, I'm not sure what the drill is.

Need more information.
Mandrake should finish loading.Just won't
have network setup.
If you are not getting to the desktop, try reinstalling
and choose not to set up the network at this time. You
can do that later.
If you are getting to the desktop, maybe we can help you
get setup.
You can boot your installation from cd1 or cd2. Installation
seems to go a little different with each cd startup.
If booting with cd2, at the message " doesn't seem to be an
installation file", remove cd2 and insert cd1.
Also, at the first screen, where you hit "enter" to start
installing, hit f1 instead,then f2,f3,f4. Read everything at
each one. They tell you how to get around some installation
problems. You may want to install in text mode.

Whoops, just dawned on me, you're not installing.
I'm not familiar with MOVE.
 
We need some more help here.
 
HEEEEELP !
 
I'll see if I can find and DL MOVE tomorrow.
I need to see if I can figure out what I'm
talking about.

Given the problems that you are having, i am going to assume that you have a corrupted cd disk.
 
What speed did you burn the cd disk at? More than 4X or 8X speed?
 
Did you also check the validity of the download?
 
What media did you burn in, cdrw or cdr?
 
See my article here.
 
These are common problems burning iso images.

Hi , Danleff
I think he said that disk came glued inside a book cover.
Those disks sometimes take a beating in route to bookstores
so you're probably right about it being corrupted.
Also ,he said he started the machine then tried to cram it
in the drive before the bootloader took over.Probably got
a few scratches.

New member jumping in.....
 
To try Linux and see how it really works, get one of the free distros and INSTALL it--either dual-boot with Windows**--or on a separate machine.
 
I would start with Ubuntu: it is free, only needs one CD for a complete install, and it seems to be VERY robust.
 
The anxiety--free way to set up dual boot:
 
Buy a separate hard drive for the Linux install---you can get 40GB REALLY cheap. If you have nay kind of problem, you can recover with the Windows install CD--using "restore MBR"--or something like that.