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    Elitebook 8740W will not boot from external DVD

    Discussion in 'HP' started by edpatterson, Jun 23, 2010.

  1. edpatterson

    edpatterson Newbie

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    Greetings, and welcome to my first post :)

    I purchased an 8740W with dual HDD's. It came configured as 2 drives, I needed it setup for RAID1. So, I went into BIOS enabled the RAID, rebooted, it went to Windows 7 (surprise!). Rebooted, entered the RAID controller setup and configured it for RAID1, ignored the dire warnings, shut down. Connected the external DVD USB drive (ordered with laptop) and inserted a Server 2008 R2 DVD. No boot devices found. Back into BIOS, moved USB CD to the top of the boot list, restarted, no boot device found. <grumble, mumble, moan>.

    Eject the DVD inserted it into a Dell 760, restarted and it booted from the media just fine although it did manage to hose the existing Windows 7 installation <grumble, mumble, moan>

    Any ideas on getting the thing to boot from the HP external DVD drive. I could call tech support but that is cheating.

    Thanks for any and all help.
    Ed
     
    edpatterson, Jun 23, 2010
    #1
  2. lagitup

    lagitup Notebook Consultant

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    Have you tried booting another disc on your 8740 w/usb drive or trying to boot from the usb drive on another computer? Another thing you could do is try to boot off a usb stick, it is possible to install windows from a bootable usb flash drive.
     
    lagitup, Jun 23, 2010
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  3. edpatterson

    edpatterson Newbie

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    Good point about testing the drive. I will see if it will boot to a Linux Live CD. The point of the exercise it to get Server 2008 R2 and Hyper V running on it.
     
    edpatterson, Jun 23, 2010
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  4. edpatterson

    edpatterson Newbie

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    OK, got it working finally. Turns out I had to configure the network boot options even though there was no LAN cable connected and network boot was last in the list.
     
    edpatterson, Jun 29, 2010
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