Laptop dual boot

I want to have a dual boot system of Linux and Windows however my LiveCD doesnt appear in the boot menu or the bios. Is there a way of installing Linux within Windows and still have dual boot funcitonality? 

Any help appreciated. 

Yes, you can do that even with ancient equipment. However, before trying something like the PLoP boot manager, I would suggest looking at your BIOS/EUFI settings again especially if it's a EUFI based system. Pay particular attention to the "boot order" since you want your boot device (CD/DVD/BR, USB, whatever) to be first in the list -- not your HDD/SSD. Unfortunately, not all BIOS's/EUFI's are created equal and they do occasionally differ on where this is adjusted, even (rarely) among the same computer models. I'm also making a huge assumption that whatever you are trying to boot from is actually "bootable" too.

I don't know if that helps since my condensed answer is really to just check your BIOS/EUFI again as I'm 90-percent sure you haven't looked closely enough. Good luck...

 

Your DVD drive dosen't show up in the boot menu in your bios? 

That all depends on the BIOS and what "menu" you're talking about.

Quite simply, if your DVD is not seen during POST (power on self test) the BIOS won't pass it as a viable boot device to the OS. This can be confusing since most OS's, like Windows, will eventually be able to see nearly any SATA device after the system is up. It's confusing since some BIOS's might not even show optical drives in their boot menu which really can be used for booting. (Usually, this menu is accessed after powering on and hitting something like ESC, F8, F9 or something.) But you can usually work around this limitation by setting the optical drive as the first boot device in the BIOS/EUFI (and making sure you have a bootable disk in it). The key is to make your BIOS/EUFI look at your optical drive first. IOW, be sure the 'boot order' looks at your DVD before it looks at any HDD/SSD.

Also, if you set the optical drives parameters to ACHI (which you would want for fast HDD/SSD's) it may not even work! (Some BR drives may need this but it is rare.) So make sure the slower optical drives are on a separate slower SATA controller and that the controller is set to "IDE" mode. Consult your mobo or SATA controller on that one.

And in some cases, you may even have to set a boot delay so that the drive can be detected! But again, it's all in the BIOS/EUFI settings.

 

Does your mobo have secure boot? Microsoft's answer to limit you from taking windows off your computer? try disabling it if you do. You could always pull a partition out of your HDD and use that.  

If you disable secure boot and install linux through the legacy mode of your BIOS, you'll end up having to switch between the modes in BIOS every time you boot from one OS to another. Here's a guide to installing Linux (Ubuntu in this case), so it boots correctly with UEFI:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI 

 

Often it's easier just to run Linux in a VM, in my opinion. If you have Win7 running on standard BIOS, you could try using WUBI for an easier install (you can install directly from Windows like any other application). 

first make sure your disc drive works, then try using unetbootin or yumi to create a liveUSB, otherwise do what the others say and check your bios settings