LXDE Forums

No way around it, when I start trying to learn a new board/forum, I always at least once post in the wrong category, so if this isn't the right spot, somebody let me know.

I have an old sony vaio that I installed Lubuntu 14.04 on, a few weeks ago, then I got busy and let it set a few weeks. Today I went to install some educational software for my son. Anyway, I pressed the power button, it loaded up to the grub selection screen, but I was unable to make a selection. The computer was totally unresponsive. I tried restarting it about 5 times, then gave up and tried to just reinstall the OS. I got the same disk that I originally used to install, it got to the post screen, and then gave me an error of "Boot from ATAPI CD rom: No Emulation". I tried a few more times with the same result, then put the disk in another pc, and it works perfectly.

So that leaves me completely dead in the water, I have also tried a USB installer, however it did not detect the USB drive, and I can't get the F keys to work to boot into BIOS. The computer originally had Vista, I then installed with Lubuntu 10.10. It was working fine for my other son to look up cheat codes for his video games. I think the cpu is 1.8, I know it only has 512k ram. When the computer was given to me however long ago that was, I upgraded the 20g hdd, with a 80g. Could it have just died in the last couple weeks? Or is this something that can be fixed?

Any ideas that might work. So far Google hasn't turned up anything that matches what my problem close enough to help me.

I put:
"Boot from ATAPI CD rom: No Emulation"
(exactly that, including the quotation marks)
into the search field here:
https://startpage.com
I got several pages of results. I only looked at the first 2 hits. The second one,
http://www.computing.net/answers/window ... 92331.html
looked like it might be relevant and among other things mentioned a possibility that had already come to mind: that there's a problem with the cd drive. You could try cleaning it or replacing it. Some brick and mortar retailers will let you return a component if you try swapping out and that turns out not to be the problem.

3 other possibilities come to mind:

1. If the machine has a working floppy drive, look around for a distro that will let you boot from a floppy. You might search the phrase:
"install from a floppy"
including the quotation marks.
2.Try other distros.
3.This one is a little tricky. Take out the hard drive and put it in another machine. Install a system on it. If it were me, I'd try a plain jane minimal command line only system, using the mini.iso for Ubuntu 14.04 although you MIGHT get away with a full install. Some distros (sorry, I don't recall which) will give you an option to install either only the drivers specifically needed or a WHOLE BUNCH of drivers for many different kinds of hardware. If you see such an option, take the "whole lot of drivers" choice. Put the drive back in the computer it was in and try to boot it. If you get a command prompt you should be able to install whatever you want, including xorg or something similar and a gui suite. If you want lubuntu with all the bells and whistles just Good luck.