OK, no one seemed to reply to the post, lol, so I read over it again, and forgot to call dell. I called them, after about 45 min, a person picks up the phone, obviously not from the US. I explained my situation, he told me to hold, so he could 'research' for the answer...8 minutes later, all he was able to do was explain to me how to boot from a CD. When I told him I knew how to do this, he had me hold for another 5 minutes, and then he told me to hold the function key while pressing the power button. (then he hung up on me) This loaded a diagnostics program by dell. btw, has anyone ever seen this program? (it was totally new to me) I had the program test the CD drive. It told me the CD in the drive had no data (it was the Ubuntu CD), so I had to put another one in to continue. Obviously no errors came up after the CD was switched, because it passed the problem by doing that.

...RelyT's explaination is seeming to become more and more logical to me...

anyway, I was thinking, is it possible to boot from a network? I've read about this, but have never done it, and have no idea how hard this is to do.