Advent 6418 (N340S8) laptop won't boot any CD/DVD other than Winxp!WTF?

Hi,

I've been given an old one of these laptops and I was going to try to
nurse it back to health by getting replacements for broken bits and
stuff, but I thought I'd try to boot a few OSes that I intend to run
on it.

I've tried DragonFly BSD 2.0 and Ubuntu i386 Hardy and both fail when
the BIOS states "searching for boot record on CDROM..." then it says
"not found", yet when I boot the XP disc, it finds one fine! What's
going on?

Thanks,
Luke.

lucretia wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been given an old one of these laptops and I was going to try to
> nurse it back to health by getting replacements for broken bits and
> stuff, but I thought I'd try to boot a few OSes that I intend to run
> on it.
>
> I've tried DragonFly BSD 2.0 and Ubuntu i386 Hardy and both fail when
> the BIOS states "searching for boot record on CDROM..." then it says
> "not found", yet when I boot the XP disc, it finds one fine! What's
> going on?
>
> Thanks,
> Luke.

Try to reinstall XP; if that works, then you can reformat the XP
partition with your Linux install CD of choice, maybe, possibly.

It might be that the existing BIOS is too old to manage a newer Linux.

Q