Cant boot from the CD after installing Ubuntu

[Wade Smart]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:54 PM, J <dreadpiratejeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Wade Smart <wadesmart at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
>>> Wade Smart wrote:
>>>> I have a laptop with XP on it and I finally decided to try 12.04 LTS.
>>>> I installed it side by side. Now I cant boot from the CD even when
>>>> going into the boot menu.
>>>
>>> The boot-from-CD function is something that happens far too early for
>>> Ubuntu to have much of an effect on this. What actually happens when
>>> you try to boot from CD? Do you get any error messages? Can you boot
>>> the same CDs on other machines?
>>>
>> After pushing the on button and I see "Hit F10" for
>> boot order and when I do and select cdrom for the
>> first choice, you hear the cd drive spin up and then
>> the screen blinks once or twice and you now see the
>> initial purpleish screen to choose Ubuntu, ubuntu recovery,
>> memory test, a different memory test or Windows XP.
>>
>> You cant at any point boot from the cd.
>
> As Avi said, booting from CD takes place in the system's Firmware,
> well outside of the Grub or XP Bootloaders, they have nothing to do
> with this.
>
> After the system finished POST, it then starts looking through the
> boot order (set up in BIOS, or as you mention, by selecting an option
> after hitting an F key to invoke the menu directly).  So in your case,
> what happens is your machine POSTs you hit F10 at the prompt and get a
> boot menu.  You select the CD drive.  The system then spins up the
> drive, which you hear.  You may also hear the laser being moved back
> and forth across the disk as the drive searches for a bootable data
> sector.
>
> The screen blinking once or twice could be one of two things... A: the
> optical drive does find a bootable sector, tries booting from that and
> fails, or B: the optical drive fails to find the bootable sector, and
> the blinking is just a product of the system resetting a bit before
> moving automatically to the default boot item, which is the HDD in
> your case.
>
> So one of two things is happening here, most likely.
>
> 1: Your optical drive is bad
> 2: the CD is bad, scratched or dirty
>
> Beyond that, you may have more deeply involved issues (bad RAM could
> also be a culprit) but this all happens outside of the OS and
> Bootloader on the hard drive, so they really have nothing to do with
> it.
>
> If you have a laptop with XP on it, I'm going to bet it's fairly old,
> so a failing or failed CD drive is certainly a likely culprit here.
>
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Its a newer laptop but I use XP because of preference.
Ive tried  several windows cds (xp, vista, win 7) and none
will start up but any ubuntu cd I put in starts up pretty quick.

Wade
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