tried to find a solution but I wasn't able so far.
I downloaded the torrent version of ubuntu 12.10 and burned it onto a dvd and created a bootable stick using unetbootin... the thing is, when restarting my computer won't recognize the dvd (the optical drive DOES read dvds...) and booting from cd works fine.
Trying to install it from the usb stick I get a black screen with a blue square labeled "unetbootin" and it seems like it wants to install, but I get "uncompression error - system halted" before it gets past the second text line. Any suggestion? My computer ran 12.04 just fine and I'm using Mint 11 as a temporary solution