Does the light for the drive turn on? There's a chance that the boot track for the CD is not setup correctly which would give the error you describe.
By chance do you have another bootable cd to confirm it's not a hardware issue? Or another system to verify the boot-ability of the CD..?

Message Edited by Lnx805 on 05-05-2007 03:12 PM

Howdy Heres a link to a good dual boot / grub page 

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm

I use 2 hard drives to dual boot my 8400 with XP & Ubuntu - Feisty & works great for me. I have edited Grub to have XP boot first, unless I hit F1 so I can boot into Feisty

Bob

edited in I.E. to make the link work, one of the things that I dislike about the forums & firefox

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Message Edited by bob350 on 05-06-2007 08:53 AM

I have several dual boot systems at home:
For example in the DELL I have installed Windows XP & Fedora, in the other HP I have Windows Server 2003 along with Windows XP and the new Ubuntu bistro installed.
In all cases I have used Norton Partition Magic 8.0 to create the dual or triple partition.

When I installed Ubuntu I let Ubuntu do the automatic installation and be in charge of the main menu. Ubuntu became the default OS so now If I want to access either windows XP or Windows Server all I have to do is choose the Windows Loader from the main Ubuntu menu.

"Easy like Sunday Morning"

I think you can make do with just one partition for Ubuntu, but it's better to have 3; one for the system, one for your Home (so you can reinstall without destroying your files), and a Swap partition; the latter is like a Page file, generally 1 - 1.5 times the amount of RAM. I use around 1.2 times on mine. 5-6Gb ought to be plenty for the Root partition, unless you run a server with a large Var directory, in which case you could set up a separate partition for that, too.

Andersen is correct, you may not need an extra partition for Ubuntu to operate; but it is better in the long run for system upgrades and such. The reason I did not do it is because I'm running a total of 3 different operating systems in the same machine.

This is an interesting problem. You might want to troll around other linux forums looking for people with a similar circumstance. I would offer the following advice: 1. If your onboard CD is dead, remove it from your system. If it isn't working then removing it from your system isn't going to really harm anything. If it is sort of working, but not enough to be usable, my thought is that it can only add to the confusion. 2. While Ubuntu certainly supports USB, the kernel may not load USB support until after it starts booting. If it doesn't have USB support immediately, then it can't see the CD ROM drive. The following post talks about a situation similar to yours, but maybe not quite the same, it may be a good starting point for you. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80811 Please reply if you need more help. I am by no means an expert, but I have gotten enough systems working in various distros to be dangerous. John