I was going to reformat and reinstall windows, but when I tell the computer to boot from the CD-ROM drive it just boots from the hard drive and windows loads.

So in the boot order in Setup I disabled the HD and put the CD-ROM at the top. I get a message saying that boot failed, press F1 to retry or F2 to enter Setup. I have 2 drives connected to the secondary IDE controller . . . a DVD drive and a CD-RW. Both are set to Cable Select.

Any ideas on what to do?

6/17/2006 3:43:06 PM

You sure the cd is a bootable cd?

6/17/2006 4:27:06 PM

its the Windows reinstallation CD that came with the computer.

It reads from the CD once I'm in windows . . . but then I get errors because I am running SP2 and the disk is for SP1

6/17/2006 4:29:29 PM

Is it a dell? Because if you're trying to use a Dell oem installation disc on a non dell computer, I think it won't install.

6/17/2006 9:06:03 PM

^ haha o yes it will

6/17/2006 10:03:10 PM

Its on the computer it came with.

6/17/2006 10:19:12 PM

anybody???

6/18/2006 8:37:43 PM

Some Dell's are really strange about the way their cabling, jumpers and BIOS settings work. Took forever yesterday to hook-up a DVD Burner as a secondary slave

Steps to try:
1) Disable ALL other IDE/SATA devices in the BIOS. Change boot order to floppy, CD, HD.
2) Disconnect the ribbons from all but the optical drive you want to use to boot to CD with.
3) Boot system, verify BIOS is recognizing optical drive correctly and NO other drives are recognized.
4) Put in a blank floppy, put in bootable CD.
5) System will show up and say "invalid boot device" on the floppy, remove floppy. Hit space bar. Tell us if a "Press any key to boot from CD..." shows up. (Otherwise, you'll end up with a prompt saying "No boot device selected" ... in which case, it's probably the CD).
6) Repeat 1-5, connecting one device at a time, verify the CD will boot each time.

6/18/2006 8:47:32 PM

How old is the Dell?

Most, if not all, dells come with a 250ish MB partition with Windows install files...I think the keyboard short cut is like shift F9 or something during bootup to -reinstall it like factory

6/18/2006 9:02:44 PM