Harry can't burn a CD? Or what's going on here?

[sniffnoy]

I will detail just what the hell is going on with my laptop later. For now, the relevant fact is that I am trying to burn an Ubuntu installation CD. Seriously. That's all. This is an easy, easy procedure, right?

Since my own computer is down, I can do this on the house's common computer (running some form of Linux), or I can go to the office and use one of the school's computers (Macs). (Or I could borrow someone else's, yes, but I figure I should figure this out first.)

I bought a pack of 5 CD-RWs; I've wasted two on this so far.

First one, I did at home. Poked around the "applications" menu until I found a CD burning program (Brasero). When it was done, looked like all the stuff was there, but my laptop couldn't boot it. Weird, I thought; let's try that again, and check for any options I might have missed.

Well, that was a big waste of time, as somehow in the one day inbetween these attempts, the computer's HD had been filled up to the point there was no room to re-download the ISO? I don't claim to understand that. (I'd deleted the ISO after burning the CD the first time to save space, as it is a common computer.)

OK. Go to the office. Download the ISO. (Wow, that was fast, compared to home, I should have done it this way first!) Burn the CD, literally following the instructions on the Ubuntu website. All seems to go well, except once again, the damned thing isn't bootable. The Mac even tells me so when I put the disc back in it ("Bootable: no"). And Mac's Disk Utility doesn't seem to have any option for explicitly setting a CD you're writing to be bootable.

...what the hell's going on here? Do I need CD-Rs or something? (I hope not, the store was out of those. There were DVD-Rs, but I don't think the school's computer can write those.) Or was I actually doing something wrong here? Or what?

I guess I can try doing it from a USB stick next, otherwise... but... any ideas? :-/

ADDENDUM 2 HOURS LATER: So apparently Macs don't make a distinction between bootable and non-bootable CDs - presumably why Ubuntu's instructions don't bother with it! But, I am just using a Mac to do the burning, I am not trying to install Ubuntu on a Mac...

...also, it looks like these instructions for doing it on a USB stick will require administrative access.

New plan: Run home, get my USB stick, put the ISO on there, then burn the CD at home, this time making sure to do whatever is needed to make it bootable. That should work, right? Assuming I can figure out that last step. :P Any help is certainly appreciated...

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

...if there is actually such a thing as a distinction between a "bootable" and "non-bootable" CD, I had never heard of it.

It sounds more like a problem with the laptop you're trying to boot it on.

Also, did you try using the USB stick as the boot device? There are programs that can set it up for that.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

There must be some such distinction, since the relevant program on the Mac told me it was a non-bootable CD! Can't remember what that might have been without it in front of me, though.

Yuck, for all I know it's possible there's something wrong with the CD drive - I never used it much.

Doing it the USB stick way is a little problematic. It looks like I'd need administrative access to do it on a Mac (the school computers); and to do it on here, well, there's the problem of HD space. So I'd need to go to Mike or someone and ask if I can delete things! I guess if this fails I should just ask to borrow someone else's computer to do it...

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

I assume you've checked the obvious--the BIOS is allowing the machine to boot from a CD?

Also, I never use CD-RWs if I can possibly avoid it. I've never had a good experience with them. I don't know if they could be causing this--for all I know the BIOS refuses to boot from a CD that isn't fixated or something--but when in doubt I'll never use them over plain CD-Rs.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

I can certainly select it; indeed, I *have* manually selected it, to no effect.

I don't trust CD-RWs either; unfortunately the store didn't have CD-Rs. I would think they should be fixated, though, because I haven't been selecting the option to leave the CD open after burning. This computer can burn DVDs, though, so I guess I can go back and try it on a DVD-R...

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

The other "obvious" thing to check in the BIOS to make sure the CD drive has sufficiently high priority--but, if the computer told you the disc itself wasn't bootable, that's probably not it.

Suggestion: you have the USB stick, and there's the house Linux machine. Presumably you can write to the CD right off the stick, without having to copy the ISO to the HD?

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Well, the computer I'm trying to install this on didn't tell me that. But I mean I opened the boot menu and selected the CD drive, and it didn't work, so... no.

I'm currently writing it off the USB stick - the lack of HD space is just a problem if I want to write it *to* a USB stick.

Currently trying it with a DVD-R.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

...OK, that one something actually went wrong with the burning (like, it actually reported an error). Maybe I'll get another and try again tomorrow... meanwhile I've sent an email to the house asking if anyone has any Ubuntu CDs. :P

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

You've already successfully burned it to CDs a few times. I wonder: could you set up some sort of crazy Unix pipeline that lets you use the CD as a .iso file, and plug that straight into a program that makes a bootable USB stick?

I don't know how you'd do that off my head, but my thought is to set up a named pipe with a program feeding the ISO into it and just use that. That makes a number of assumptions, however, chief among them that the program generating the USB stick uses it as a single stream of data and doesn't need non-sequential reads on the file; I don't know how those programs work.

Mind you, that's probably far too complicated a solution for your problem. If you're willing to spend that much effort on the issue, it'd be a lot simpler to just hunt down whoever used up space on the house computer and tell them to delete their shit. :)