If you read my previous post, I mentioned a fellow on my Local Linux User Group, Michael Ward.  As I was writing the post, all sorts of memories came flooding back to me.  Michael was the first to help me install Linux on my computer.  I drove over to his place and he installed RedHat for me.  This would have been about 10 years ago so it must have been RedHat version 5 give or take.  He was also the one who taught me how to build computers. 

The first "computer" my family had was a Commodore 64.  I loved that thing - it had the best games.  Our next computer was a 386 and was built with scrap pieces by NAIT students and it had Win3.1.  Somehow my Mom had a connection with someone there and we got it for cheap.  Back then cheap was in the $2000 range if memory serves me correctly. 

The dot matrix printer that we had for that machine was awesome.  It had the paper with the holes on the sides.  What a beast.  I swear that thing worked better than many of today's printers.  

A few years later my Mom purchased a computer from a local shop, Centauri computers in Edmonton.  And a couple years after that is when myself and a friend took the "Build your own computer" course from Michael Ward in the upstairs of that same shop.   I've been building my own computers since then.

Michael has a great website where you can read about the basics of computers and computer related things such as "How to buy a computer", "Multi-booting a computer" and more.

I'm fairly certain there are scores of other computer geeks who can relate to this story.

On my local Linux User Group (LUG) mailinglist, a question was asked on how to make a bootable CD.  They thought they could just copy over the Grub file then set the BIOS to boot from the CD first.  Their subject was "my dumb linux question of the week".

First of all, a good LUG should live by the rule that there are no dumb questions.  

Michael Ward, a member of the mailinglist, had a nice response that I'd like to repost here:

"The files needed to boot a computer have to be located in very specific places
on the media. You can't create a bootable disk/device (floppy, harddisk, cd,
dvd, memory stick, zip, etc.) simply by copying files to it with an ordinary
copy command, or drag-n-drop.

To make bootable disks/devices requires utilities that place the appropriate
files where they need to be (anybody remember the old DOS sys command?). Most
newer CD/DVD burning software will make bootable disks.

How to make a grub boot cd:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Making-a-GRUB-bootable-CD-ROM.html

Hundreds (thousands?) of bootable disk images are available for downloading.
Try here, for example:

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php?showonly=&sort=ImageSize"

This is a great response.  It's polite and it answers the question, but does so in a way that requires the reader to roll up there sleeves to learn more on their own. 

You can visit Michael at www.mward.ca where he has a number of computer related articles.