I am 100% sure that you pointed me in the right direction, however, it still failed. Here is a break down of what happened:
Plopped in the disk a rebooted. different Ubuntu instillation system started that I must say is absolutely superb. Now it went fine until it got to the point of mounting the disk. It failed at that point.
Now, something that I forgot to mention was the fact that I have two cd/dvd drives.
My main drive is a super combo dvd/cd reader and burner. BIOS says that this is my cdrom 0
The second one is a cd reader and burner that is on the fritz. It randomly disconnects from the computer, meaning that windows, nor the bios can detect it some times. I hardly ever use it and it must be 10-6 years old. It can go disconnected for a long time (days sometimes), and rebooting does nothing. BIOS reads as cd rom 1.
So back to the install process. I got a message saying that it couldn't mount the live disc, and this was probably caused by the disk not being in the trey. I pressed retry a few times to no avail. BUT, then it struck me: Why not just toss the disk in the lower tray and see what happens? Guess what? It worked. It wen through the mount step and started "copying files" or something like that. Remember how this drive sometimes randomly disconnects? well apparently that is what happened sometime during this instillation. Nothing happened to my system that I can tell from this abort (booted into windows fine and all disk sizes are the same). But guess what the trick didn't work again because the CD wasn't there.
Well, the obvious next step, that I took, was to go into the good old bios and disable the disc 1 (the cd only drive). No luck here. The instillation persists that the disc is not in the drive. EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO SECOND DRIVE IN THE BIOS.
Well, the obvious solution that I know you guys will tell me is to try a USB live disk. Well, my bios won't support that. I really really don't want to risk editing the bios or messing around in there. Is there a way to trigger a boot from a USB device in windows 2000? Or some other way? Maybe booting from the cd and then plugging in the USB flash drive? I'm sure that if I could achieve a USB boot I would probably be well on my way.
The second route is what I'm probably going to have to end up doing. I'm probably going to go into the guts of the computer and "pull the plug" on the old cd drive. That could fix the problem of linux being confused over which cd drive is which... how knows?
I hope it works!
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