Killed my laptop?

[redmoose]

OK guys, here's what has happened. I have a 4 yr old fairly basic laptop which came with Windows Vista which I detest. In an attempt to resuscitate the machine rather than throw it out I have wiped the machine completely - using "killdisk" -and am now trying to install Ubuntu (version 11.02?) from a disk which I burned from my desktop.

When I try to boot the laptop from the disk I get one line

ISOLINUX 4.02 debian-20101016 ETCD Copyright ........Peter Anin et al

Nothing else and I can't seem to do anything with it.

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening?

Please keep any replies super simple !

Thanks!

[mörgæs]

Hi, welcome to the fora.

There are some ideas in this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1580857

[Alwimo]

OK guys, here's what has happened. I have a 4 yr old fairly basic laptop which came with Windows Vista which I detest. In an attempt to resuscitate the machine rather than throw it out I have wiped the machine completely - using "killdisk" -and am now trying to install Ubuntu (version 11.02?) from a disk which I burned from my desktop.

When I try to boot the laptop from the disk I get one line

ISOLINUX 4.02 debian-20101016 ETCD Copyright ........Peter Anin et al

Nothing else and I can't seem to do anything with it.

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening?

Please keep any replies super simple !

Thanks!
That's 11.04. That line should come up, and be on the screen for a few seconds, before moving on.

Although I'm not familiar with killdisk, I would suggest installing Ubuntu 10.10 or 10.04 on a laptop from that time period. You will be less likely to run into issues.

[redmoose]

Hi, welcome to the fora.

There are some ideas in this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1580857

Thanks for the welcome

[redmoose]

That's 11.04. That line should come up, and be on the screen for a few seconds, before moving on.

Although I'm not familiar with killdisk, I would suggest installing Ubuntu 10.10 or 10.04 on a laptop from that time period. You will be less likely to run into issues.

Thanks for the advice - I'll get working on an older version and see how that works out.

The line comes up and stays there - nothing else happens.

[redmoose]

Thanks a lot for the help. I downloaded the older version and it works like a dream. I can't believe how fast it is on an older machine - faster than my speedy i5 processor running windows 7 on my new desktop. I'm officially an Ubuntu convert!

[mörgæs]

That was good news. Have fun experimenting, and if something goes wrong, you know where to ask.