Gateway laptop ignores LiveCD

[jamayama]

I was given an old Gateway 450SX4 laptop which I'm trying to upgrade to my first Ubuntu box. I made a LiveCD of Ubuntu 8.04 Server (a friend suggested I start with 8.04 for stability reasons), 32-bit version. I checked the BIOS which is configured correctly, to boot from the CD drive first. The CD is burned correctly - lots of files and folders and not just the .iso file. Nevertheless, the laptop ignores the CD on boot-up. That is to say, the CD drive spins, but the computer still boots into windows as always. Any suggestions?

Is it possible that this computer is simply too old to run 8.04? It's a 400mhz Pentium 4 with 256 MB RAM, running Windows NT.

Thanks in advance.

[Happy_Man]

Did you hash the CD to make sure it was burned correctly? That's always a possible problem for things like this.

Also, why Ubuntu server? If this is your first time using Ubuntu, that's going to make it harder for you to get up and running. I'd suggest ubuntu desktop version, or perhaps even xubuntu desktop (designed for less powerful computers).