cant instal linux

[crunchman]

im totally new to linux, always wanted to try it, never had a reason besides curiosity, and my alienware area-51 m5550 laptop froze every time it tried to load windows vista

it would not boot in safe mode, last known good config, or normal startup. on a normal startup it would freeze with the black screen with a green bar with microsoft corporation underneath it.

on safe mode it would run all the way down to a crcdisk.sys file and freeze

so i decided with help from a friend to instal ubuntu 9.04.

i downloaded, burned image to disc, put it in my alienware, and it loads the language menu, i hit english, and it pulls up the bootup menu. i hit try ubuntu, and it pulls up a black screen with a flashing grey curser. it wont load past that point, even giving it 15 minutes. same with the install option, check disk option, and the memory option.

im not sure what all info will help, but this is what i got:

(n-core 2 duo 2.00ghz t7200 4mb 667mhz processor, 1 gig of ram, a 5550 r2 ati 128mb x1400 mxm2 hybrid video/graphics card, seagate 160gb 5400rpm sata hd)

as i am new to linux, im not sure what to do to proceed. ive burned another copy of the disk, to the same effects. any help would be awesome.

[rokytnji]

If memtest freezes you may have a hardware problem unfortunately. Same with safe mode in Vista.

If it was me, I would download and burn a copy of Puppy Linux. Iwould go with these two lines below link

puppy-3.01-seamonkey.iso 15 Oct 2007, 00:00:00 98.8 MB
puppy-3.01-seamonkey.iso.md5.txt 15 Oct 2007, 00:00:00 60 byte

Check Md5sum of download for iso integrity. Burn iso at 4x or 8x speed.

Index of /puppyfiles/

The reason I would do this is to make sure something would boot up so I could run some hardware checks in Linux. Puppy is pretty forgiving when it comes to hardware because it does not try to enable all of it.

Another option is to see if a Ultimate Boot Cd iso will run and run some diagnostics with it.