Help with an Acer Aspire 5920

[d.matt.savage]

So, I'm new to this and risk exposing the vast tracts of my ignorance by opening my mouth, but I figure it's worth it in the end.

Here's what I've got: an Acer Aspire 5920 with Vista. I've got 2 hard drives and I'd like to load Ubuntu 9.04 on the second one and get used to it for a while before making the switch over.

I can boot from the installation CD no problem, but then I run into a problem. The screen loads with the various options, but they are all totally unresponsive. I can navigate through all of the help menus and load Vista from my hard drive, but nothing else does anything. If I select "install" or "check memory" or "check disc for errors" all that happens is the CD spins a little and then... nothing.

I tried opening it from the liveCD on my desktop using wubi, but when I click on that it doesn't respond. Like nothing happened.

I've pretty much narrowed it down to two options: either there's some obvious solution that I just have no idea about, or my computer is a little bit... ahem... special.

Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Bartender]

d. matt -
I also have an Acer 5920. It's a laptop. I'm quite sure there's only room for one drive. How can you have two?
I dual-booted 8.10 with Vista on the original drive, but it's a long story. PM me if you want. Right now the dual boot drive is in a drawer and the 5920 is spinning a 7200 rpm drive with 9.04 installed. The 7200 rpm drive makes things happen faster than the original 5400. Oh, just ocurred to me. Maybe that's what you mean by two hard drives - that you own two, just like me, not that they're both installed :)

What happens if you pop that CD in another PC? Preferably a plain-Jane desktop PC running either Intel onboard graphics or nVidia graphics. Desktop PC's are, generally speaking, less quirky than laptops. I'm thinking that the CD might be faulty. One of the easiest ways to check is to spin it on a few different PC's.