Cant boot from the CD after installing Ubuntu

[Colin Law]

On 4 October 2012 20:58, Wade Smart <wadesmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think we all assumed that it was all CDs that you could not boot
off.  Are you saying you can boot off an Ubuntu CD but not off a Win
CD?

Colin