Odd booting from CD behavior

OS / Drivers / BIOS
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mwingeier
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Odd booting from CD behavior

Post by mwingeier »

My system has never booted to the CD, UNLESS the primary hard drive was unreadable or blank. If the drive is unreadable or blank, it boots to the CD just fine. If the drive is in tact, but unbootable, IE BOOT.INI is gone, then it just boots to the standard Windows error.
Does anyone else have this behavior, or a place to start looking for the problem? That's the only problem I've ever had with this otherwise excellent board, and it's becoming a pain in the rear with every OS taking up more and more floppies, or not even being able to be started from floppy. Thanks.
InactiveX
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Post by InactiveX »

Hey there mwingeier!

I apologise if you've already tried this and you think I'm being funny, but have you tried changing the boot drive order setting in the BIOS setup?

From there, you can set the computer to boot from the CD drive before any other drive, including hard disks or the floppy.

Hold down the "Del" key when you start the PC to get into BIOS setup.
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Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

agree...
if it will boot from the CD when the hdd is blank, then your boot order must be
a,c,cd or
c,a,cd

if it IS bootable,
cd,c,a
then it will boot, unless it is a windows cd and it is installed.
windows cd's are smart enough to ask if you want to boot or go to the hard drive.
give us more info, mobo type, etc, and we'll go further
mwingeier
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Bios

Post by mwingeier »

Yes, I have tried the BIOS setup. It is, naturally, the first place I go. :D I actually stumbled upon the answer somewhere on this board after I posted. Setting all the drives to auto did the trick. I guess I'm old school, and used to detecting my drives by habit. Now I'll never know why there is an auto detect section when you're not supposed to use it, but that's another story...
davd_bob
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Post by davd_bob »

I've had "issues" with some CD drives when NOT set to auto.
Probably something to do with the I/O specs that get reported by the drive. In auto the system allows the CD to report its settings then the system checks to make sure the settings work, and if not the system tries different I/O speeds and such until it finds a combo that works. If the system can't find settings that work, it ignores the existance of the drive.
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guppergoo
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Post by guppergoo »

another thing to think of is if the cd actually has the firmware / support to boot from the drive. Some older drives dont work. Sometimes I have found that swapping in a "newer" drive for the OS install etc works for the short term. Then just yank it out and put your old drive back in.
headseed
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Post by headseed »

You only need the channel that the optical drive is on set to auto. If you are not continuously booting from CD (like if you use a live CD such as Knoppix), then once you get your OS installed on the hard drive you can auto detect all the drives. If you ever need to boot from optical again just set it back to auto instead of none.

Glad to see you searched and found the answer, I knew it was on here, I had similar issues a while back.
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