After Installing Ubuntu 10.04, My PC is now unable to boot from CD, Please help

[nimdave24]

Dear Team

I am a new joinee for Linux. I am not a computer graduate or studied anything about computers, but with time I ve learnt a bit about it. Well I was a routin windows user and just 1-2 months back i have came to know much about Linux OS and I was shocked, amazed, surprised, and excited to try linux. Since its a free OS i thought that nothing is wrong to try it at least.

Then I have came to know abt Ubuntu and i heard that they are also sending free CDs, I have applied for one free CD and surprisingly It came to my home as well. I have 3 computers at my home, all were run on win-xp previously. all 3 are ancient PC with old low configuration. but my normal pc use is surf internet and to see normal word / excel files om my mail ID, so even i dont need a high configuration PCs.

Now I am a very much new to linux and do not know much about it so I need an OS which is easy to install and has a great community, so I ve finalized my choice on ubuntu. Now I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 in one of my ancient PC (Celeron 465 Mhz, 256 Ram, 20GB HDD), I have install it without making any partition on my HDD (So only one partition of 20GB). it runs ok but when it comes to speed its damn slow, and when i m opening Open office its hell slow, i have to wait for atlest a minute to open OO file. and it is the same story with almost all applications,
In short i found ubuntu 10.04 very slow on my that PC. The reasons behind it may be Ubuntu 10.04 has so many unnecessary programs. whatever but i have make my mind to change the OS from Ubuntu.
Now I had 2 Option one is back to WIn-xp or
another linux os which is fast on my PC
I have done lots of research and decided to try small linux OS which may be faster and easy to use, I have made the CDs for Puppy-5, Slitaz-3.0 and DSL4.4.10, Since all of them runs on RAM, I have decided to atleast try all of them and whichever is more suitable to me I will install it on my Hard disk. and i would have a small fast OS!!

Now comes the twist in the tale!!!
The CDs of Puppy, DSL, Slitaz are ok ,working nicely, i have tried it on my another PC (Which has XP on it ), puppy & DSL working nicely on it, but my Ubuntu system is not taking anything. Its not getting booted from those CDs, I have tried every physical means & ways to get it booted but got failure every time. I have change CD Drives, CD Cables, Changed Jumpers as many times as possible, changed CDs and bios changes o many time, but my system is not getting booted from the CD, even I have tried Win-XP CD also but my system is not taking that as well.

Even I select First Boot from CD, normal Ubuntu starts and when normal desktop comes it shows me CD drive with its CD name (Like Puppy, DSL, XP Etc), means my PC takes CD drive but not getting booted from it.

Any suggestion? friends

N.B. My Hard disk and CD ROM drives works on the same cable, because only one slot on the mother board is working and please dont ask me to change the jumper or put a jumper on mother board as well because dont forget i have already install ubuntu on the same system with the same circumstances (With one cable only and with jumper put at the right place)

[HROAdmin26]

Short Answer: The OS installed on your harddrive has nothing to do with enabling/disabling what medium the PC boots from. This is purely a matter of hardware and your PC's BIOS.

I don't think you have a correctly burned CD image for the Linux OS's. *If* the XP CD starts to boot (meaning that the BIOS has correctly booted from the CD) and then seems to hang, this is a common result of the Windows installer hanging when trying to read non-Windows partitions. Removing the partition table (which destroys the data on disk) will allow the XP CD to boot.

[hatebreed]

I have to disagree HRO, I've never seen the windows cd hang during boot. The only thing it may do is not recognize the hard drive in the partition selection because it can't recognize linux partitions. However, I do agree that it is a hardware issue. Since you have the drives on the same cable there may be an issue with the drive trying to do a cable select, even though you have the jumpers set. This happens with certain drives that don't get along. Have you tried to switch the cable order around? Meaning, put your cdrom on the first port on the cable and the hard drive on the second port. This sounds like it wouldn't make any difference but I have seen this happen before. Also make sure that your jumpers are not set to cable select, but instead master and slave. This will force your drives to take the correct position. And some bios have a setting to enable cd boot as well as changing the boot order to cd first. post back with results.

[HROAdmin26]

Google: site:linuxforums.org windows cd won't boot

I've done this *hundreds* of times on *hundreds* of different PC's and servers. You can take my word for it or you can take a poll from the other experienced mods on here. When any thread starts with "I don't want Linux any more but my Windows XX CD hangs during booting," the first response is "blow away the partition table to make Windows happy."

Windows will not "fail to find a HDD" because it can't read the partition table (as you suggest.) It either finds an HDD or not based on the driver for the controller. Once it finds an HDD, Windows will try to enumerate the partitions - which it wants to do because the default for Linux is an MSDOS table (just like Windows.) But, a Linux installer may align the partitions using different cylinder boundaries than Windows likes. This and other configs can cause the Windows installer (which has "booted" correctly from CD/USB) to then hang at a later stage. The OP has not really clarified if the Windows CD (which I am assuming is retail and not a 'home burn') starts to boot (BIOS displays "press any key to boot from CD), or if the CD is just bypassed because the BIOS does not recognize a bootable medium in the drive.

[hatebreed]

Well have to say have never ran into that before. I've never had any issues with the windows installer or booting to the cd. Hardware is the problem no doubt. I"ve installed windows hundreds of times also, been using microsoft OSs since dos 1, used to work for a major pc manufacturer, which will remain nameless, build custom pcs etc. It's not an issue with the installer.