Upgrade problem to 9.04

[danylong]

Hey guys,
I have been using ubuntu for quite some time now (since 6.06) and have been just upgrading my system by the built in updater and not doing new fresh installs of the new distributions. So when 9.04 came out I went to do the same thing and everything was going fine. As it was installing the upgrade it suddenly stopped and told me that the upgrade failed and that the system might be unstable. I then rebooted and cannot get back into ubuntu as it freezes at the log in menu after I put in my username and password. So, I have decided it would be a good idea to just to a clean install of 9.04 I already backed up the important files via some ext3 viewer on my windows partition. The problem now is I cant get into a live cd of the 9.04 I burnt or a legit official copy of 6.06 I mail ordered. This leads me to believe its a problem with my computer? rather than the cd?
Please help me get ubuntu running again. I would definitely want to keep my windows partiton by the way just so you know
Thanks

[A. J. Rimmer]

Hi. I gave up on upgrades a long time ago and decided that doing clean installs was much better, besides giving me a chance to dump some of the software that I have installed but never use anymore. That's just a personal quirk, though, and does nothing to help with your problem, I'm afraid!

You might be having trouble with your optical drive. The optical drive on my laptop failed recently. It was not a complete or sudden failure, but started acting flaky -- sometimes it would work and sometimes not. Took me a long time to figure out that it wasn't something I was doing or bad software, but I finally took the plunge and replaced the drive, and that fixed everything.

Since you have Windows also on your computer, I suggest using that to test the optical drive. Not being able to read your 6.06 live CD that is presumably good really sounds like a bad drive.

Just thinking -- can you borrow a USB CD drive, or swap your drive into an external USB enclosure, or swap the drive into another computer? Might be a way to see whether it is the CD or the drive.