Installing Ubuntu

Did you MD5 check the ISO?
Did you verify the CD was burned when you first booted to it?
Did you burn as slowly as you could?

MD5 check? I am new to this, how is it done? How do I verify the CD was burned? Should I burn again slowly? Sorry if i sound naive.

Claude

Regarding MD5: have a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM.

And use the slowest speed to burn the CD.

Hope it helps.
Peter

Claudice, I will explain

MD5 checks are used to verify the data.

You have downloaded a massive piece of information over the internet which is a complex network of wires and interconnection devices.
The data caan get garbaged in transmission at any point in its travel and the TCP protocol helps by checking data as it comes down BUT errors can still pass checksums and will be appended to the data. MD5 checks are critical to be sure that the data you have is EXACTLY as it should be by calculatiing a hash value, you can then compare this to the hash you calculate using the same method. If they do not match then the data will need to be downloaded again.

With the burn speed, a faster burn speed does not change the dye on the media as much as a slower burn, some bios' have problems burned at higer speeds. Its a good practice to burn slowly for installation speeds so that this is not a factor. Its also good to burn audio CDs slowly too for the same reason (if it is intended for a hard CD player)

If the MD5 check passes and verification passes (boot to CD and read the screen, you will see "Check CD for defects") then you may need some extra boot options:

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

These will disable fancy options in the kernel like ACPI, APIC, DMA etc that can make the install run smoother.

Thanks guys for the help. This is what I did, I follow the link by Peter and did the MD5 check which stated it was diffrent. Been a novice I decided to burn a new CD with low speed which was 8X. The burning process went well and I was able to boot with the CD and this time went all the way to the Welcome screen and selected all necessary option as well as partitioning my hard disk. selected 10GB for the UBUNTU and the remaining 134GB for the Windows XP. All went well until the installation process reached 56% and there was an error reading "errno5"

Clicking OK brought me to the desktop, thought well, it is done until I restarted and there was no option to boot from which operating systems. Cleaned the CD did the installation again and the same problem except this time I used 2.5GB. Now the 12.5GB is lost. How do I regain those partitions back to the Windows partitions/ Windows file system? Do I need to redownload the ISO? Can I get a good CD copy from someone?

I am new please.

Claude

If the MD5 sum is different, the CD ISO you have is BAD and needs redownloading. Simple as that. Non matching MD5 sum means the data has been garbaged in transit and is useless, the CD you have burned is also useless.

So how do I get back the 12GB which was use for thee failed installation?

And also please DO NOT burn the ISO on a rewritable disk.