Installing With Problematic Computer / CD Drive ??

[Unparallelogram]

I am trying to install Ubuntu on a old laptop that seems to have a somewhat faulty CD drive. It makes scary noises like the disc is scraping the tray. As far as I can tell though, data is being read properly but far slower than expected, possibly because it's failing and retrying repeatedly. The same computer also experienced what at the time seemed to be a hard disk crash when I last used it many years ago, although the disk shows no signs of issue currently and boots Windows XP properly. The Ubuntu LiveCD loads but takes extraordinarily long to get into GNOME and then stops before the desktop finishes loading. Given that I think the rest of the system is still functional, I would like to install Ubuntu and use the components that aren't broken yet. I'm somewhat interested in what is and isn't broken on this system, but my main concern right now is to successfully install onto what I assume is a working hard drive.

[taurus]

What's the spec of your old machine? Maybe it doesn't have enough RAM to run the LiveCD. And if you think the harddrive is acting up, better get a new harddrive because it could go any day unless you don't care about your data on it.

[Guille Damke]

Just a guess, which speed did you use to record the CD? probably it has some effect since it is an old CD drive, and it may perform better if you load a disk is written in a low speed.

[Unparallelogram]

It's a laptop with 1.5GHz Celeron and 256 MB RAM. Nothing special but not too old or low end either. I recorded the CD at whatever default speed GNOME's CD recording dialog uses.