Quote Originally Posted by kcs636
i get a different result now by using 3.9 versus 5.1. starts to read and flashes
isolinux 2.04 (debian.....) copyright....

and then nothing. nothing appears in the screen and i assume it should.
Well, it would seem most likely that something other than a blank screen is the desired end goal. But the blank screen you describe is not something all that rare. The Cheat Codes mentioned in the downloading faq may be what you need. But I'm still wondering what happens when you try to boot the CD on the other computer that you mentioned.

Quote Originally Posted by kcs636
so perhaps i'm passed the download issue, but i don't know if something should
come up right away or i should wait a long long time.
Booting generally takes two or three minutes, may be faster on a very fast system or somewhat slower on a memory starved system(less that 128 meg). High speed burns, when they boot at all, can cause slow booting as well. There was someone on the site a few years ago who mentioned booting taking about 5 minutes. After I convinced them to read the downloading faq and burn the disc slowly they reported that their boot time dropped to about 2 minutes. From what you have said I'm not at all clear if you are past the download issues or not. It sounds like you are using mirrors (although I have no idea where you found a copy of 3.9) and that you are not checking the md5 checksum. So I would think that you have still not read the downloading faq or decided to just ignore things in it. I could be wrong.

Quote Originally Posted by kcs636
since i got different result from 3.9 and 5.1 perhaps i'll download another iso and try
a different version.
Hardly seems reasonable. If the md5 checksum is correct then the download was good. If it is bad then the download was bad. You can check that much faster than you can download a new ISO, even if you have to learn about md5 first. And checking the md5 checksum is always important if you use a mirror rather than BitTorrent. Not sure why you have 5.1 rather than 5.1.1 (suspect you might even have 5.1.1), but downloading more versions rather than understanding what you are doing doesn't make much sense. However, if you must download another version and you plan to try using a wireless connection, I suggest getting 4.02, wireless worked much better in that version than in 5.x versions.