Booting from CD

Jesdisciple · April 24, 2009, 3:35pm

Hi, hardware newbie here.

I need to boot my laptop from a CD. I’ve set the CD drive as primary boot device in BIOS and can read the DVD-RW. But when I boot, it goes straight to the HDD’s OS (Ubuntu Linux). Can anyone help, please?

Jesdisciple · April 25, 2009, 1:59pm

(bump)

donkey42 · April 25, 2009, 2:57pm

my first thought is is the DVD RW disc clean ?

to be sure rub the writable side of the disc on a cotton surface (like on a cotton T-Shirt)

BTW: rub in a circular motion

and are you placing the disc the correct way around (not upside-down)

Jesdisciple · April 25, 2009, 5:01pm

Disc rubbed, nothing changed.

The DVD is upright (label side on top).

Would those have prevented reading of the disc? As noted above, I’m a newbie - but I would have thought those would be covered by “I … can read the DVD-RW.” Maybe I’m more of a newbie than I thought…

Thanks.

donkey42 · April 25, 2009, 6:01pm

no not when booting from DVD it does’t give an error (well that’s how my system is, but systems differ from manufaturer to manufacterer (i built my system)) however in Win you are correct

Jesdisciple · April 25, 2009, 8:26pm

In case it helps, this is an Acer TravelMate 3260.

I recently booted from an Ubuntu Live CD shipped by Canonical; I wonder if another such disc would have good chances of working unlike this DVD? (The earlier one has Gutsy or Hardy, and I’ll need to upgrade to Jaunty anyway - although I was planning to do that with another DVD-RW.)

EDIT: I also wonder if that’s a substantial hint as to what the problem is…