Thanks to the kindness of someone on my message board, I got a free CD Burner that the other person wasn’t using. It arrived in the mail yesterday, and I had it up and running in about 1/2 an hour. I bought some blank media late last night and didn’t start trying to burn things until today.

First up was some ISO’s of Mandrake Linux 9.2, because I desperately wanted to upgrade. I am currently running Mandrake 8.0, and every time I wanted to install something I would go into dependency hell.

I am using an evaluation version of a CD Burning software called Nero, which was recommended to me by a bunch of people at Lakedwellers. Good interface on the program, but I kept having problems burning off the ISO’s. The really frustrating thing is that the burn would error out at the end of the burning process, not the beginning. I would see the progress meter get up to 99% and then the error would come. Frustration.

After three or four times, I finally got smart and paid attention to the log files and then searched the site for information regarding the error. It turned out that because the ISO files were so huge, the program couldn’t automatically finalize the CD after the burn, I had to finalize it manually. I fixed that step and was able to successfully write the ISO’s properly. Jubilation.

So I finally burned off my three ISO’s, and happily turned to my next step, installing an upgrade to my Linux system. Then I come to discover that I don’t have enough room on my hard drive to successfully upgrade! Frustration.

But then someone else at Lakedwellers offered to give me a hard drive that he wasn’t using, so in another couple days I will be back in business. Jubilation.