(SOLVED)As dire as it sounds? - 'No suitable media available for disc contents'?

[besonian]

Can somebody tell me what this means? It's occurred towards the end of booting from a live CD.

Error: No suitable media available for disc contents

I'm trying to sort out a friend's computer (Vista OS. New 18 months ago) which has all but frozen up. It's so slow it's quite unusable. Booting takes anything up to 15 minutes! And anything beyond that is hopeless. He wants to take Vista off it and put XP on. And in order to get his vast amounts of data off it I'm trying to boot with a live CD. I've tried with 2009.4, with PCLXDE, and with both I get that same message. I've just tried with Minime2009 - first time I got the same message; the second time - after I'd chosen the option to boot with VESA graphics - it made it! (What the graphics might have to do with it I can't imagine - perhaps someone else can).

OK, that's good it's booted now. But the error that came up from the others wasn't an error - if you see what I mean. Something caused it. And I wonder if - and the mess that Vista is in would support this - if the hard drive is on the blink. (SATA 160gb). Has anybody any ideas about this? I've run - or tried to run - a hard drive diagnostic utility and it wouldn't even run. The diagnosic partition on the computer (accessed prior to the OS) gives all components a clean bill of health. But if there's a chance the drive is up the pictures, I clearly don't want to be installing XP on it.

Having managed to boot at last with Minime I'm right now getting his data off it onto an external hard drive. But if there's anybody out there who might have some idea what's going on I'd love to hear from them.  

[Neal ManBear]

You will see that error when using the wrong boot option for the hardware you're using. For example, if you're booting the liveCD option on a box with a SATA CD/DVD drive, that is what you will see. In this example, you'd need the SATA boot option. If the drivers on the CD do not support the video card, you might get this error, and the vesa boot option should be used.

[besonian]

Oh dear - thank you Neal. I've done it again  Obvious isn't it, when you think about it? Which I didn't. I've just done it again, this time with the SATA option, and the live CD of 2009.4 boots perfectly. And that's no doubt why the disk diagnostic utility wouldn't run - it's designed, as far as I know, for IDE drives. I'll put SOLVED on this. Many thanks once again.