Suspect it's not the problem ,but rather an ancient Laptop turning turtle. I'm trying to reinstall on an ancient laptop. I've got it formatted ,and I've had problems with install discs. So just in case, I burned an ISO on my 64bit W7 PC .PC says it can see, but laptop says all is wrong. I'd have thought that disc would be same on 64/32 bit machine, but it's a choice- Laptop giving problems or 64/32 bit probl;ems. OS in question is w2000.

I use imgburn and never have any issues.  Could the CD drive on the laptop be faulty if it is having issues reading the disks you have burnt?

if its an old laptop it may not have a 64bit compatible CPU, essentially it must be at least a core2duo , if its earlier than this (for example CoreDuo)  you'll need to get the 32bit DVD.

 

You can install the 32bit version on a 64bit machine, but not the other way round.

You should be fine burning a 32bit image on a 64bit PC.

 

The problem is probably more mundane like the lappy CD drive being fussy. I'd try burning another using a different program. If possible I'd burn from a different PC as wel.

If you want a really good CD/DVD burning prog then this is excellent and free.

 

http://cdburnerxp.se/download

 

Ignore the fact it has XP in the name. It works great in all versions of Windows.

 

Ian

I'd suggest mannyo has hit nail on head . It's an old IBM 600 SERIES. I wondered, but couldn't think of any problems. I've burnt the CD using 32 bit XP and laptop accepts it with problems. I've never had problems using ISO Burner before, other than keeping the speed down, but I also found that although Asda CD work well with NERO for copying/ making CDs they don't like ISO at over x1 speed. Problem was that although I couldn't copy the CD to HDD using DOS copy or XTREE , I could read CD in both DOS and Xtree ( Xtree is an old DOS program that manipulates files in DOS, same way Ztree does in Windows),but not copy.

nbames- possibly as the CD reader is a bit old, it's got vision problems on older CD, though I did try the 64 burnt disc on XP,32 and XP had problerms reading it on a vastly higher spec PC.

Thanks for the ideas. Think a lot of problems were down to HDD issues on the Laptop. The CD I use for w2k cannot be used in DOS, so it's install 98 first and then upgrade. I found that although there was an extended partition on the HDD, no logical drive was present. i didn't want multiboot, as 98 causes HDD  driver problems. So in went 2k again, get up to format and a DOS format performed. That's when drive D appeared .FDISK ,format to single drive install 98 and then 2k and it runs reasonably well for a 500 M processor with minimal memory.

If it's an ISO then all you need is imgburn and it's free!

http://www.imgburn.com

I am guessing you are just placing the ISO on the disk and not using software like IMGBURN? If so it wont work and certainly will not be bootable.

If you put the windows disk in your PC and open it up - How many files do you see in there? Just the one or loads?

Thanks, guys. I did burn a lot of stuff in XP on 32 bit and problems melted. I think that perhaps next time I sort out main PC,I'll add W2K to the system ,so that any CD I burn are burnt in win 2k mode, as those I did burn with 2K on system are seen as good. For folks having burning problems from ISO- I've found that certain discs don't take to being burnt from ISO at high speeds.i use x1 for best efforts/