Can't install System Recovery disks, using Ubuntu to fix

[Tim_Barrett]

I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right thread, but if can help me that would be great!

Basically, I had this Windows 7 installation and it was really cluttered, so I installed Ubuntu to get rid of it so I could install Windows 7 again, but the disk wouldn't boot, so I broke down and bought recovery disks, and those wouldn't boot. An old Windows XP disk did boot for some reason (but I can't install it, it's IDE drives and I have SATA)

And a week of messing with the partitions and generally making the situation worse (not an expert with tech ). I wiped the whole hard drive, and didn't realize that I probably got rid of the bootmgr and the mbr.

So now I installed Ubuntu again (permanently, not a live boot)

So I'm wondering, how can I get my computer to see the installation disk, either in boot or while I'm runnning Ubuntu?

All help is appreciated!
Thank you

[Mark Phelps]

There's no way to "force" the running OS to "see" the contents of the optical drive. If you have tried several different disks, and now have tried two different OSs (Windows and Ubuntu) and NONE of them see disks in your optical drive, that points to a hardware failure of the drive -- which installing a different OS is NOT going to fix.

You should try the disks in a different PC to confirm they can be read.

If those work, you should see if you can get one of the CD cleaner kits (a disk with little "whiskers" on it) that cleans the lens on CD/DVD readers. If you can get one of those and run it in your optical drive, if the lens is dirty, that will clean it. IF that does not improve the situation, you need to replace the drive.