Hai,
This is a reply that i had sent to another javaranch user who was facing problems with tomcat installation.
Please check out whether these are the steps you followed while installation.(The steps are below)
At the browser,if u type==>
http://localhost:8080 u will get homepage if your installation has been proper.
This is the url of the site from which u can download tomcat.Download jakarta-tomcat-3.2.1.zip for win machines.
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-tomcat/release/v3.2.1/bin/ The steps are
1)After you download tomcat from the net,U will get a zip file.
2)Extract that zip file to your drive eg D drive.U just need to right click the zip file and select the drive to extract it to.
3)Automatically a folder called jakarta-tomcat will be created in that specific drive.
4)Rename the folder to tomcat.
5)There will be a folder called webapps inside tomcat containing 4 war files.
6) Open up winzip and in this go to first war file and select extract to the same folder ie suppose the first war file is admin.war.create a new folder admin in webapps and extract contents of admin.war to it.similarily for all the other three files.
7)Go to environment variables in NT and 2000.set path as==>
TOMCAT_HOME with value Drivename:\tomcat
8)similarily set JAVA_HOME with value Drivename:\jdkx.x
here x.x being the version.
IF it is a 95 system set the above paths in autoexec.bat.
Now go to bin and run startup.
U will hopefully see a window popping up from which a new one will pop up.
Now u are up and running
Send a reply if u have nay queries.