Dumped at A:\ Prompt by KNOPPIX

[Harry Kuhman]

The Nero Express menu has:

1. Data:-
a. Data Disc,
b. Bootable Data Disc,

4. Disc Image or Saved Project::-
Record a disc from disc image previously burned onto the hard drive.

I chose: Bootable Data Disc,

Yup, you did. That was wrong, And you made a bootable disk, it just didn't boot into Knoppix. Use the option that I explained already.

burn speed is 40, I used 24,

Use 4x. Trust me on this, that's why you are coming here for advice after all. Or read through this forum to see all of the people who have already posted back that when they burned at a high speed the CD would not boot but when they dropped down to 4x it did.

how do you check the md5 sum?, do I have to download it & burn it along with the ISO?.

There are a lot of md5 programs available, a simple Google search would have found a lot. I like this one. You download the tiny md5 file that is associated with your iso (if you used Bittorrent it should have come down with the iso, otherwise it's available on the mirrors). This is basically a checksum. You computer the md5 sum of the file that you downloaded and match it to what it should be to be sure that your download is not corrupt. If you don't do this then you're wasting your time and ours burning and asking why it doesn't work. Once you have confirmed the md5 checksum, you do not burn it to the disk.

What is the best burning software & why is NERO Express so bad?

There is lots of software that will burn an ISO, or "image file". Why Nero express is so bad I don't know, I guess they just made it bad so that they could both charge OEMs to distribute it and then get users to buy the upgrade to the normal Nero interface. But it certainly looks like it would burn the iso, if you just used the right option. I like the regular Nero, although there were some things in Nero 5 that I liked more than I like version 6. Version 6 has some other improvements but overall I think it's a step backwards, wouldn't use it except my Nero 6 wouldn't recognize my new DVD drive. But Nero 6 insisted on uniinstalling my Nero 5, and did a few other nasty things too. Fortunately, other burning software that I already own (NTI) would recognize my DVD player (after a software upgrade), so I switched back to Nero 5 rather than use the disgusting Nero for Dummies interface. I don't know that any software is "the best", may work just fine and most will burn ISO files. But there certainly is some bad burning software.