Unable to boot from DVD

Hello.

I have a problem with my HP Compaq 8510w, running Vista. The computer is working smoothly, and so far Vista seems ok. The only thing that sucks is the partitioning which is pre-defined by HP, giving me -- in effect -- one drive with 100gb, one with 1,5gb, and one HP recovery drive occupying 8gbs.

This HP drive is bootable, so that I can always return to the computers original condition when having problems. The drawback is, of course, all the HP software and stuff you get on your computer, just occupying space and time.

I want to clean the whole computer, repartitionate the way I like it (one system drive c:, and one personal drive d , and I have a legal Vista-ISO (and XP, for that matter) burned to a DVD.

However, I am not able to boot from the DVDs. I have tested it on other computers, and it works fine. Its almost like I'm lacking some drivers or something in the BIOS, because the option "press a key to boot from DVD" does not appear.

My computer knowledge is somewhere over average - I think - and I have tweaked a little in BIOS to get it to boot. Still, I am out of luck.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Espen Dale, Norway.

 

I'm not familiar with your PC, but in most BIOS settings there's a way to specify which devices are bootable and in which order the BIOS will check them for a bootable image. Look under the "Advanced features" tab (if there is one) or some other options page.

Sometimes the hard drive is specified ahead of the optical drive, so the only time it would boot from the DVD is if the hard drive is not bootable. In that case, change the order so it looks at the DVD first.

 

When my system boots, at the bottom (for like half a second), it flashes the different options - one being F11 for Boot Options. I noticed that when I go into the BIOS, I could find no boot options, but then I realized that I have to hit different keys when the HP screen flashes in order to get different BIOS options. So annoying. Anyway, that could be why. Otherwise, the order of boot should appear in the advanced features (or whatever they may call it) of the BIOS, like rochrunner said.

HP recovery has advanced settings that allowed me to remove the recovery partition after creating recovery disks without having to reformat or do anything else. That could be another option for you.