All is now working fine.

Thank You for all your patience and suggestions all who chimed in.

Nero.

In addition to needing to hit F8 it would appear I had a bad disk drive. I replaced it and Ubuntu is in the process of installing right now

After much searching on Google I found that if I press F8 during start up it gives me menu options for which device to boot from. For me, the random numbers and letters choice is the cdrom.

It has detected the cd and is currently stuck at the Where are you? screen.

Hopefully I will have more positive progress to report soon.

I found an old red hat linux boot floppy that I had kicking around. I forgot I even had it and don't know if I could find the install disks.

The comp will try and boot from the floppy though. I'm pretty sure that my new comp doesn't have any way to hook up an ide floppy drive so I probably can't make one for Ubuntu. If I have to I will open up the new comp and see.

Could I install red hat, assuming I have the disks and then install ubuntu over top of that once i get the linux comp up and running?

Or I am making things way too complicated and should just give up?

I have burned the Ubuntu files to a cd instead a dvd, thinking that might be the issue.

No difference.

I replaced the disk drive with a new one to see if that was the issue.

Now when I start the comp, it goes thru it's ide scan and sees the disk drive the same as it always has but I get a very quick notice saying a bootable cdrom has been found which I was not seeing before. However I still get the same masseage saying..

Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key.
Changing disks or rebooting does not change this. I even started the comp without a disk in the drive and waited for this message and then inserted the disk with no change.

This happens with all the disks I have burned and regardless of jumper settings on the drive.

3dvd's and 1 cd were burned.....burn image to disk,
1 cd was burned as make a bootable cd.
All get the same results as described above.

On the off chance that I got a bad copy of Ubuntu, I grabbed Mandriva to try it.

With the hard drive formatted to ext3 and the image burned to disc it still won't boot.

From looking around the site a faq's and tutorials, I see that the files are showing on the disk properly. That is as files not an iso file.

I have set atapi cd/rom as first boot and disabled all others.

Start up ide scan does detect the disk drive.

On start up with the disk in the drive I now get...

Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key.

Pressing any key gets the same result. When I check the bios, the settings are as I left them.

Even though this comp worked fine until the hard drive crapped out on me, I tried changing the jumper on the disk drive from cable select to master but the results were the same.

Thank you all for your continued patience and attempts to help.

I found a partitioning program to format the drive to ext3.

Should I be "burning the image to disk" or just copying the iso file to the disk. I burned the image to a disk originally and this is what I have been trying to use.

Should I try a different distro? I want ease of use for a noob but not one that is a windows look a like.

Also, what's the diff between gnome and kde versions?

How would I format the hard drive to an ext file format? I thought I read somewhere that on install Linux would automatically reformat the drive.

Also if the files are already on the drive, shouldn't it boot from that or does it have to be from a disk?

The entire message is Bootmgr is missing. Press ctrl+alt+delete to restart. If I do that, I still get the same message.
This happens when the hard drive is formatted to ntfs, regardless of whether I try to boot from a dvd or the hard drive.

Currently the hard drive is formatted to ntfs. I used magic iso to extract the disk image directly to the drive and put it back in the other comp.
I set the bios to boot from the hard drive first, the cd rom drive second and it still says the bootmgr is missing.

I have disconnected a second cd/dvd drive so that the comp does not detect it while starting. When I am in the bios it is seeing the hard drive and the disk drive and there is only one hard drive in the comp.

I have tried formatting the hard drive to fat32 and booting from the dvd and also copied the files directly to the hard drive in fat32 format, while making to needed boot sequence changes in the bios each time so that whichever I am trying to boot from is the first choice.

When I start the comp and the hdd is formatted to fat32 I get a message saying please remove disk media and try again. This happen whether I try to boot from the dvd or the hdd.

The bios does not offer me an option to boot from a usb device and I don't have a floppy disk drive on my working computer so those are not an option.

I changed the bios setting to boot from a cd/dvd before I tried to load up the first time. The comp is recognizing that there is a bootable disk.

As for windows settings, unless they are hiding in the bios there wouldn't be any I don't think.

I reformatted the hard drive twice just to be safe.