can't install UBUNTU disk on WinMe machine, won't start.

Are you mean you cannot boot your pc from the Ubuntu 9.10 live install cd...?
The live cd doesn't load...?

Thank you

Assuming that the CD-ROM with the Ubuntu 9.10 is okay, you have to choose to boot first from the CD-ROM player. When starting use something like F10 or F12 to get a boot option list or use F2, Ctrl, Esc, Delete whatever to bring up the BIOS screen so you can adjust the boot order to pick the CD-ROM first.

If all that still fails, you may have a bad CD-ROM player unit.

Once able to use the CD-ROM player at least see if Ubuntu 9.10 as a live CD will come up normally. If not there could be other issues with the computer. From the live CD screen there is an installer icon.

Note that a really old hard drive may give you performance issues even if Ubuntu 9.10 completely loads. If your machine were mine, I'd put in a new hard drive before trying to load Ubuntu.

Since nothing seems to work, I agree with you. It's time for another hard drive. I suspected the cd burner first, and downloaded Nero. That didn't help either. I had absolutely no problems what-so-ever loading this disk on my WinXP machine. I'm very new to UBUNTU (1 week) and really like it.

Thanks for helping me.

Chuck

Enough RAM?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=495256
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?s=b5fa5631c85b1f79056621febbb8a3a8&p=8896816&postcount=8

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation

In case that's your Dell, hints from other distros.
http://spazioweb.inwind.it/dende/mydell/
http://x.unix.se/stuff/inspiron4k.xml
http://home.earthlink.net/~vdgoot/inspiron/

David's above post got me to the solution with this older machine, By using the f-2 key, and forcing the CD as first choice on boot up, the disk started to load.

Many thanks to EVERYONE who took the time to add a message.

Chuck