Inspiron 12500 won't boot from CD

Hi,

I need to boot my DELL Inspiron 12500(PP02L) with a Bootable CD. However, everytime I'm booting, it straight goes and boots WinXP from the Hard Disk.

I tried F12 when booting and it doesn't do anything - WinXP boots up from the Hard Disk without giving me an option of any kind.

I even tried F2 and it took me to the BIOS.
I see 'Removable media' and it has 'Hard Disk', 'CD-ROM', 'Intel....
'Hard Disk' is selected, but when I move down to CD-ROM and press enter, nothing happens. With CD-ROM selected, I press F10 to save and exit. The computer boots up, but it does not boot from the CD-ROM. It just loads WinXP again from the Hard Disk.

Pls help.

 

Try looking for "Boot order" in the BIOS - "Removable Media" sounds more like a listing of what can be removed than a place where you can actually change settings. If there's a boot order section, that should be what you're looking for.

For the F12, when did you press it? It should work if it's pressed when the Dell logo is up and the white bar is moving across the screen above the BIOS version and computer model. Once it's started to boot up Windows, it's too late for F12 to do anything. Also make sure F12 is the right key - I'm pretty sure it is on my Dell, but F12 isn't an across-the-board standard.

It's also possible that the CD isn't actually bootable. I once meant to make a bootable CD from an .iso file that contained a bootable program, but burned the .iso file itself to the CD instead, and was surprised to see it didn't boot from the CD until I realized what I'd done. You may want to try booting from the CD from another computer if you've got everything else set up correctly.

 

Thanks.

The CD is bootable - it's a ready Linux UBUNTU Live CD Boot disk and boots OK from other PC's.

I'm actually trying to help a friend (in a different country) be able to boot his Inspiron with the CD, so the machine is not actually in front of me. Is it possible to get some screenshots of the Dell Inspiron 12500 (PP02L) BIOS somewhere on the internet so I can see the settings? or, is there any freeware that can control BIOS settings from windows (so I may be able to offer him "remote assistance"?