pre-2006 computers were a bit hit and miss with regards to booting usb. But you can use plop bootmanager or grub on an optical disk to boot usb on those older machines. Otherwise CDs come in sets and ONLY the first and maybe the second disk are "bootable". Depending on distro, the other 318+ discs are just packages in decending popularity. Kidding on the count, sort of (it'll get there someday).

Mine is an 07 model. I gave up on the USB and went back to the C/D...DVD. It now is showing ISOLINUX 6.03 20151222 ETC Copyright......in the upper corner of the black screen. there is a flashing _ under the above ISO stuff. Been there for over an hour. Giving up for the night and going to bed. I might just donate this old thing. It's been wiped of every thing!

Well, the fact that it said ISOLINUX ... says that the disc was at least partially read properly, and was written to disc in the correct method (as opposed to writing the iso file as a file within a data filesystem).

Do you have a spare blank CD or DVD? If you just want to get the darn thing to work, I would recommend you try burning a Debian netinst CD and install Debian using that. Even if your optical drive is a bit flaky and can only read a little of the disc successfully, the netinst CD is very small so there's a good chance it will work okay.

I have the same model of computer (Dell E521), and I just used the Debian 9 netinst CD (amd64) to do a fresh install on it the other day. What can I say? It just plain worked. I booted the installer off the stock DVD-ROM drive.

There was no step which took minutes to respond. It booted up in seconds after POST to the first installer menu, and every step after that showed continuous activity (or was sitting there waiting for my input). Not exactly the fastest thing in the world, but there was no time when there was any extended period of inactivity where I wondered if anything was messed up.

Oh, FWIW, I have also booted my Dell E521 off of USB many times. No problems booting off of USB thumbdrives. I regularly boot off of USB thumbdrive install of Debian to run gparted for cloning or resizing OS partitions.

Thank you IsaacKuo! Reading your post, my spirits were lifted. I had used both CD/DVD drawers during this process, as the top one was flaky as you say. After reading your post I used the bottom draw and Linux loaded. I guess this old computer just needed to know there was a new system come on. Problem solved! Thank you again, and I'm glad I have a laptop to help get info I needed.

I have a quirky machine that only boots USB (on the back ports) if the usb device is on the other side of a usb hub (passive / not powered). At least for reliability, it can boot USB directly on the back ports, but it goes into a weird state when you spam F12 to bring up the bios/uefi boot menu 5 out of 6 times (guessing) it'll fail. With the hub if I wait for the chirps before spamming F12 it'll work 5 out of 6 times. My guess is that the power supply is showing it's age, as when I initially had that issue, changing plugs (away from all the other things drawing juice) made it work again. Like I said "quirky". But I mostly only use that machine for watching youtube when I break one of my laptops. And I'm no stranger to nature hate.

The surge protector that died saving the TV not too long ago.

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I have been able to load Linux using the CD/DVD! Just used the other drawer (got 2 on this old thing).

Problem solved!! Thanks for all the help!!!