The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Inpiron 9300. I want to boot from USB external CD drive

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by heyitsme!, Jun 19, 2009.

  1. heyitsme!

    heyitsme! Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    1
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hello,

    I recently had my CD/dvdrw drive crash. It plays DVDs but not CDs and I need the CD portion to work. Unfortunately I think I'm going to order one from dell and its going to take 5 business days (7 days cause of the weekend) and I need to boot up an operating system via CD for work.

    My bios says that it can be started from a USB storage device, but my external CD drive doesn't even seem like its powered up when I restart. In my bios, I have the boot option set to USB storage device and have it set as priority over any other boot option. I just paid for this external drive today, and things are still looking grim.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Thanks in advance!

    Heyitsme!
     
    heyitsme!, Jun 19, 2009
    #1
  2. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

    Reputations:
    2,962
    Messages:
    8,231
    Likes Received:
    63
    Trophy Points:
    216
    Does the external drive work when you're in Windows? If this is a purely USB-powered drive, the 9300 might not put out enough juice on its USB ports to power it...
     
    Commander Wolf, Jun 19, 2009
    #2
  3. Fragilexx

    Fragilexx Get'cha head in the game

    Reputations:
    513
    Messages:
    2,369
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    I too cannot get my external CD drive to be booted from. To be honest I don't think I've ever been able to do that on previous machines either. I'm sure on some you can; but I've never seen it personally.
     
    Fragilexx, Jun 19, 2009
    #3