I am new to Ubuntu and at the moment I am trying to get Ubuntu 12.10 to one of my machines.

The machine is a Pentium 4 @ 3.06, 2Gb RAM, 200GB Hard Drive and a NVidia GeForce 8800 GT.

A few days ago, I tried Ubuntu without installing and it worked perfectly.

Yesterday, I decided to formatted the hard drive and divide my hard drive into four partitions: 1 for the XP, 1 for Ubuntu, 1 for swamp and 1 where I will have my documents.

Everything went great, I installed XP and then Ubuntu but I did something wrong on the partition window (Ubunto partion window) that I ended up without boot loader. This morning, I formatted everything again, installed XP and when I went to install Ubuntu (with the same DVD as before) the problems started.

First, I had a black screen with a msg written with white text saying something like: unable to find a medium containing a live file system. After I burned another CD and tried again, I got stuck at the red dots (loading screen). I then went online and I read somewhere that it could be the CD, so I checked the integrity of the CD and everything was fine. I also unplugged all USBs connected to the computer and nothing changed.

I goggled further options to try to solve my problem and some users suggested that people having these types of problems should try the alternate installation, which if I am not wrong is for networks. I then tried to install and yes the installation process was different from the normal CD, but it did get stuck on a page where it was doing something, like: ...finding ethd0 and it was stuck on the 100%.

I tried USB installation as well and it also got stuck at the red dots (I do not have USB 3.0 on the computer in question).

I have burned 5 different CD's and all at low speed. I checked the integrity and all are fine. I downloaded other distribution as well as other versions of Ubuntu and I still cannot install or even run the Live CD of Ubuntu or any other distribution.

What is really annoying me is that everything was working perfectly before, when I first tried to install Ubuntu.

Anyway, any help is welcome.

Edit:

My boot load is normal, no errors and all the hardware is working fine.

I forgot to mention that after the loading screen (red dots) gets stuck, the DVD drive and the hard drive goes into idle state. I also restored the default values of the BIOS and no luck.