I have an interesting problem that I'm throwing out here because I can't find anyone mentioning it anywhere.

I recently bought a new Sony Vaio Y-series. This is the 11.6" model with no internal optical drive. If it is relevant, I left Windows 7 on a partition as well as its recovery partition. (I suppose I paid for it).

I have an external Samsung CD/DVD drive that I connect (USB-only powered). When I attempted to install Fedora 16 64-bit from a Memorex DVD (that I checksummed and successfully used on my desktop last week), it wouldn't recognize it as a bootable disc. I tried everything and did verify that the computer could read the DVD drive (I made the restore discs on the same brand DVDs without error). I also made sure that the BIOS was set to boot to the DVD drive and even tried the "boot other" command.

I downloaded a Fedora 16 64-bit live CD with a Memorex disc and I have no trouble booting from it. I installed quickly.

I would just leave it, but it bugs me that it didn't work. On top of it, I'm having trouble after the Live CD install (removing Evolution crashes Gnome). If my retry at installing fails, I'm going to want to go with the trusted DVD (and all the install options to avoid Evolution to begin with). Otherwise, maybe a solution to this will help someone else with the same problem.

Any thoughts?

I'm not quite clear. Are you saying that you were able to boot from the CD/DVD drive with one Memorex disk but not with another one or that it worked on one computer and not on the other.

The DVD worked on one computer and not the other. On the Vaio, the known good DVD didn't work, but any CD seems to be fine.

I finished the retry install of Fedora... no problems this time (with the CD, not DVD). But after leaving it idle for five minutes, the screen started flickering constantly. It is also doing this on the Vaio splash screen, BIOS screen and Windows, so it is definitely hardware. I'm wiping it and putting it back into factory condition now. For what I paid, this thing is going back to the store! I'll be back to my 10-year old laptop. :/

I now have to think this is an isolated issue with this particular computer. Thanks for inquiry, though.