How to boot laptop running ubuntu from windows xp disk

[eric55]

Hello, My Sony Vaio laptop was running dual boot Vista and Ubuntu 9.10, booting into Ubuntu first. I downloaded W8 to upgrade Vista, but managed to miss the moment when the machine rebooted. As a result, nothing worked any more. I could not get the machine to booti from a Windows disk, or anything else except Ubuntu disk. I have now reinstalled Ubuntu and upgraded it to 10.04. I have checked in the BIOS that it should boot from optical disk, but it will not comply. What can I do, please?

 

[Sam234]

Ubuntu cannot effect your bios settings, if you've optical booting enabled, its set 1st in the boot order & your optical disk is boot-able, it will work

If your saying you have a dual boot setup but it no longer gives you the boot menu, you need to fix your MBR, I use Boot Repair for that, even just to fix Windows MBR issues

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

 

[phil22]

"I have checked in the BIOS that it should boot from optical disk"

Did you make the optical drive the first boot device in the boot list?
If not, do so now, then try booting from CD again.

Regarding upgrade to Windows 8, you must make sure that your computer or laptop manufacturer supports Windows 8 on that particular model. If they don't have any Windows 8 drivers for it, do not install Windows 8 because the hardware components will not work properly, if at all. Check the manufacturer's website for driver availability.