Cd Drive works fine but not with Ubuntu

[confused old guy]

Hi everyone. I had a very old Dell laptop without operating system. I decided to install Ubuntu 10.10 on it and it seemed the CD drive was broken: a few grindings and nothing more. Experimenting, I easily installed XP using that CD drive. I removed XP and reinstalled it without any problem. I tried running Meerkat live on the laptop while XP was installed. Same thing: some grindings and then nothing. I have lots of live CD's. I have discovered that I cannot get practically any response from any version of Ubuntu, except with some older version, I can get in a screen or two before it dies. I had no luck with Mint, and could only get part way with Fedora. I have no trouble with things like puppy linux, and various windows boot cd's such as the windows ultimate boot cd. I even removed XP and installed, without any problem at all, Vista. I took vista off and went back to XP without problems. Maybe something is wrong with the cd drive, but it is odd that the problem only appears with Ubuntu and some other Linux systems. The machine is way to old to be worth a new cd drive, and also way to old to be able to boot from a USB. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance