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Well, I got my £800 paper weight up and running, my round ATA cables are a little messed up and were stopping the motherboard from detecting the 2 cd drives and 1 hdd drive.
Anyway, I was happy to throw the Debian 3.0 installation cd into my drive and watch it boot...anyway, this happened before, everything seemed to be installed or mounted...I re-booted and enetered my username and password, it accepted it, rana few lines and halted...

What can I do?
Also, when I boot it again, it says the hdd wasn't cleanly mounted and it takes a few mins to scan it.

If anyone can help i'll be ore than happy to give you a hug.

Well, I got my £800 paper weight up and running, my round ATA cables are a little messed up and were stopping the motherboard from detecting the 2 cd drives and 1 hdd drive.
Anyway, I was happy to throw the Debian 3.0 installation cd into my drive and watch it boot...anyway, this happened before, everything seemed to be installed or mounted...I re-booted and enetered my username and password, it accepted it, rana few lines and halted...

What can I do?
Also, when I boot it again, it says the hdd wasn't cleanly mounted and it takes a few mins to scan it.

If anyone can help i'll be ore than happy to give you a hug.

fine.

I would help, really I would .... but it's Linux, and I don't know squat about that.

Sorry bud :).

Do you have another OS to try it with? Might be a hardware problem...

Also if you don't know Linux, I don't know what you're doing with debian as it's not for beginners. Mandrake/SuSe are more geared towards the novice (i.e. me |o/)

I'm not sure I know what you mean. What do you mean by "halted"?

This sounds like a hardware problem.

Oh and the disk scan you experienced is just like what happens when you hard-reset Windows.

mm, it's a factory cleaned hdd, it's got something like:

scanning ============|| 50%

anyway, thats not important, so it may be a hardware problem..righto, i'll try something else.

I'm trying Debian because everyone loves it :) Mandrake isn't suitable to be a cup mat and SuSE costs money..which I don't want to spend..Linux isn't a cost thing as far as I see :)

The main point of my trying it is because pro servers use it...basically if I wanted a job in I.T. it's useful to know.

I have to say though, I like the fact that Debian isn't just Debian, it 'installed' a load of other software for me...sadly I can't use it :D

I'll go test.

I really would recommend Mandrake for a first time install. I used Debian when I first started using Linux, and frankly it was a right royal pain in the behind. The install program failed to auto-detect my not-very-exotic graphics card, leaving me fiddling about with X11 config files for hours and hours IN VI! That was the closest I've ever come to throwing a PC out of the window. Then to use my ADSL modem I had to recompile the kernel, which took another couple of days. Once it's up and running then Debian is great, although not as great as Debianophiles like to make out.

So when I upgraded my hard drive I just installed Mandrake, since it's still the only distribution that supports my modem out of the box. Now I'm going to do Linux From Scratch for a larf.

Seriously though, the Debian learning curve is not worth it for a newbie. You can always change later, what with it being free and all.

class advice and taken in, i've got Mandrake somewhere...i'll give it a go when i've found out if my hdd will store it...

No it's appalling advice. I used Mandrake first and it VERY NEARLY put me off Linux altogether. Only Luke and Debian managed to attarct me towards it again, and I ended up using it as a main OS for nearly a year!

However now it routes packets round my network and serves files, although all my other computers I get that don't have screwed IDE busses will be Debian. One Windows box is enough, heh.

ok so where can I get Debian from? ive just looked on debian.com, but is there anywhere i can get a cd from, rather than download it?