Ok from checking the bios before my problem occurred my computer is roughly 7 years old as the bios is from 2001. I often switch between XP and Ubuntu when I get bored of XP, I've installed Ubuntu fine before. Well anyway I was installing Ubuntu it needed to restart. Well now my computer will continue to reboot. The computer is set to boot from a cd and if none is found boot from the hard drive. Well even if I stick a cd in to boot from it will reboot. The keyboard is not working either. So I believe the bios has failed. What do you think? And if it is finally broken for good can I get the parts recycled?
keyboards die.. and cd drives die. 50/50 a recycler like me could get life out of it. Check keyboard and cd drive by substitution.. if it's a usb keyboard you may be in for a runaround if the bios doesn't do usb emulation... It sounds like the ubuntu (what a mess) installer has screwed up somewhere critical while writing to the MBR or something.. it does that.. especially if you use that nonsense wubi installer thing. Check all your cables.. get into the bios again and make sure everything is as it should be.. usually setting factory defaults or best performance setting does the trick. Try another installer disk.. or any bootable media. ubuntu is way too heavy for old hardware (7 years old should be using feather or dsl or debian in low memory/custom build mode) look for a lighter distro
ah wait my bad. just saw my typo. can you edit posts on here? anyway I cannot boot from a cd at all. Apologies for the annoyance. The keyboard is a ps2 type. the one with the green end. non usb. I cannot get into the bios due to the keyboard but I will see if I can find another one but I don't believe they are being sold now. They've all gone usb connectors right? Ah about the Ubuntu thing I should have done more research but it appeared to be the most common used distribution for users switching from xp to linux.
see this icon on top right side of your post as that is what you use to edit your post(s)? keyboards use purple ends not green as that is for mouse. can still get ps2 keboards & mice.
okay problem solved. I suppose the bios was trying to boot from the belkin cd in the second drive haha. Thanks for your help. It works fine. I'm going to try a smaller distro
so I've made a feather CD. how do I go about installing it to the hard drive? I think I have to mount it but what are the console commands for installing it on the hard drive? Ubuntu is still installed but I want to overwrite it with feather.
