I burned an ubunutu cd and it wont boot on my computer. The computer is an intel about 400mhz and 128 mb of ram and runs xp.

I burned it using isorecorder or whatever its called so its not that i just burned the iso file.

i thought it might be the cd so i burned it again at half speed but thtat didnt work

i tried using mandriva but that didnt work.

i checked my bios and put cd at top of the boot list.

now my computer boots up and XP is in really low resoloution and 4 bit color and my computer on boot up says something about a plug and play error or something. I dont know if this is because of linux or mabye i knocked a cord loose i dunno

someone please help! im new to linux so explain things but i dont know what it could be. i just want to install linux on my computer

What does it do when you have the BIOS set to boot from CD and boot? Does it go staight to windows?

Well you could try using https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe/Prototype which is still very new and might have bugs, I don't know. But at least you can install Ubuntu without using a CD.

yes it goes straight to windows. then i try telling the bios to just boot from cd nothing else and it says no boot disk available blah blah blah.

i tried pclinux but that didnt work i think mabye somethings wrong with the cd drive????? i dunno i hope one of you techies can help me out here

Have you tried a known good bootable CD--eg a Windows install disk? No sense in trying different distros is the CD drive is bad.

Or is your cd-drive even capable of booting from a cd? Maybe your BIOS doesn't like it. Tr searching on how to make a bootable floppy which, in turn boots the CD.

i cant find out how to make a bootable floppy for ubuntu

anyone want to explain it to me

It would be much better to respond to questions people have already asked you. When you go off on a tangent like this, folks will think you are not paying attention.

Go to Google and enter "ubuntu install boot floppy" The first few hits look like really good leads.

Also search here at LQ---I have seen several posts on this subject.

BUT---why not get you CD working??? You will need it sooner or later.

my bad...

my cd drive does work it just wont boot from cd

I am getting the feeling that I have to pull info out of you one syllable at a time....
The CD Drive is OK, but the computer will not boot from a CD?? Have you tried the suggestions I gave?
maybe you could give a summary of what you have tried, what you have learned from Google, etc.

Wow! That's how I feel too! Can you read my mind?