The entire message is Bootmgr is missing. Press ctrl+alt+delete to restart. If I do that, I still get the same message.
This happens when the hard drive is formatted to ntfs, regardless of whether I try to boot from a dvd or the hard drive.

Currently the hard drive is formatted to ntfs. I used magic iso to extract the disk image directly to the drive and put it back in the other comp.
I set the bios to boot from the hard drive first, the cd rom drive second and it still says the bootmgr is missing.

I have disconnected a second cd/dvd drive so that the comp does not detect it while starting. When I am in the bios it is seeing the hard drive and the disk drive and there is only one hard drive in the comp.

I have tried formatting the hard drive to fat32 and booting from the dvd and also copied the files directly to the hard drive in fat32 format, while making to needed boot sequence changes in the bios each time so that whichever I am trying to boot from is the first choice.

When I start the comp and the hdd is formatted to fat32 I get a message saying please remove disk media and try again. This happen whether I try to boot from the dvd or the hdd.

The bios does not offer me an option to boot from a usb device and I don't have a floppy disk drive on my working computer so those are not an option.

How would I format the hard drive to an ext file format? I thought I read somewhere that on install Linux would automatically reformat the drive.

Also if the files are already on the drive, shouldn't it boot from that or does it have to be from a disk?

I found a partitioning program to format the drive to ext3.

Should I be "burning the image to disk" or just copying the iso file to the disk. I burned the image to a disk originally and this is what I have been trying to use.

Should I try a different distro? I want ease of use for a noob but not one that is a windows look a like.

Also, what's the diff between gnome and kde versions?