Can't get laptop to boot

[DougieFresh4U]

I have been working on this for 2 days and I am ready give this one up!!
I have an old 'hp omnibook 6000' It's an Intel mother board. I believe it has 4 or 5 GB hard drive. 512 RAM, put that in myself.
I can load live-cd's and all is good. I have tried: Xubuntu-alternate 7.04 and the desktop cd. Puppy Linux loaded up ok and all was working. Dam Small Linux loaded ok.
Each time I reboot after install of mentioned os, all I get is a flashing cursor upon reboot. I know each one installed as gparted has shown me. When I install I 'erase and use entire disk'.
Can some one please shed some light here?
Need more info, please ask.
Thanks

[Mark Phelps]

I have an "old" HP Pavilion laptop and nothing newer than 8.04 works with it.

My guess is that the newer Ubuntu's were built to use the newer chipsets, at least, that's my experience trying to use them on several older machines.

With 512M of RAM, you should be able to install Ubuntu 8.04 using the standard LiveCD.

[DougieFresh4U]

Yes, I have installed 8.04 & 7.04. But when reboot comes after install, all I get is a flashing cursor on restart. So I pop in live-cd and it shows 8.04 installed, but won't boot.