so i started up my old PC and am able to get to the bio's but when i try to boot from CD-ROM I get a disc read error.
maybe I didn't copy xubuntu correctly.
that was my problem for a while. I burned a bad disc.
Are you sure you have the boot order set correctly, so that it boots from cd first?
yes I even tried disabling it from booting from anything else.
I would try burning another iso and maybe making sure its clean on the inside. It could have broken hardware inside. 