For older hardware you might have better luck with the alternative CD, depending on how old it is. You could also try turning of acpi. When the installer menu comes up, press Esc. You will get a message about leaving the graphical menu. Click OK. You'll get a boot: prompt. Enter live acpi=off so your boot prompt looks like boot: live acpi=off The Ubuntu installer help also has some other suggestions (Press F1 when the installer boot menu appears): - If you experience lockups or other hardware failures, disable buggy APIC interrupt routing: noapic nolapic boot: live noapic nolapic - Disable ACPI for PCI maps (handy for some HP servers and Via-based machines): pci-noacpi boot: live pci-noacpi -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned