Quote Originally Posted by dudepool
i tested my disk on my work computer and it works a treat! so i have no clue as to why it isnt working at all on my laptop! so ive ruled out missing files and burn error
Well, you have ruled out missing files and I'll even say that if the md5 was bad it would not likely have burnt on the other system either. You haven't really ruled out the burn issue of speed, as the faster that you burn a disc that less likely it is to boot ob some marginal optical drives. I'm more inclined to think that you need the right cheat code to boot on this system, but I can't be sure it isn't a media issue yet.

If this laptop can boot from a USB flash drive you might want to try booting Linux that way. Be warned though that even some laptops that have a USB boot option in the BIOS either will not boot a flash drive or are extremely picky about how the flash drive is created. However, I think this would be worth a try, if you saw the same error on a USB flash media boot then you could completely rule out media issues. Apparently the latest version of Knoppix can install itself to a large flash drive, but I don't have any that are suitable for it and have never done it. I have used other much smaller Linux distros to create a bootable flash drive on a small 64 meg flash drive. I think Puppy Linux can do this, but if not try DSL (it's been ages since I've done this and I don't trust my memory on which I used).