D901C wont boot from CD

I am the proud new owner of one of these babies

However, I cannot seem to get it to boot from CD.

The DVD drive is 1st in the boot order.

I have 2 sata drives set as "normal" rather than raid.

I cant see whats going wrong.

Any help is much appreciated

 

Welcome to the NBR forums

Is the disc bootable? ... it might not be.

Did you "press any key..." when it told you to?

 

Its a bootable xp cd and works on my other pc when i choose my dvd player as the first to boot.

For some reason, it isnt recognising the dvd drive on startup.

I can see the dvd in the bios

in my bios on the "Main" page my ide channel is CD-Rom

When starting up, it gets past the f2 screen and then just goes blank, i dont get any "press any key..."

Could it be something to do with the ram?

 

might it work if i create a bootable USB drive from win 98 startup disk?

Anyone have a clue how to do this?

 

Dude,, i had the sammmee exact problem when trying to install my vista cd. what i did was play around with the boot order a couple times and change my sata to ahci mode and then back to normal again i think it was just being a pain. but in the end i managed to boot it from cd

 

Tried all of the above and it still doesnt work.

This is very strange

 

does the bios detect the optical drive?

try to re-seat the optical drive in the bay.

 

Still nothing. I have tried a few different cd's now.

The DVD drive works fine no problems detecting it. Just cant use it to boot.

I even tried booting from a USB stick with win 98 startup disk, but it wont recognise anything to boot from.

 

That is really strange.Did u try the recovery CD/DVD that came with the system?

 

It is a barebone so it didnt come with original cd.

I have an original cd on a RW disc and that isnt working. My old XP version is scratched/unusable.

I have tried the toshiba recovery disk,because i have two of those laptops.

Going to try with an original XP disc soon.

Could it be the disc i am using thats the problem

I just wanna cry/and play on a fully working d901c

Cheers

 

Could it be old BIOS since it can't take any booting like pen drive?

 

Is the dvd set as the primary boot option in BIOS?

 

Yep, I have tried every boot order i can think of including mostly with the DVD player as boot no1.

Could well be a problem bios, but I know that this machine has had windows on it beforehand apparently loaded from cd.

Is there any way I can copy the windows i386 files to my laptop HD, therefore not needing the cd boot process?

Is there any way of finding out the bios version?

Cheers

 

Just to make sure you did this correctly I'm going to rehash something you "probably" already either know or surmised... but just in case.
In you bios settings you need to select the boot tab at the top right of the screen. Then you must move the cd/dvd rom drive you want to boot from to the top (#1) position in that Boot Priority list above everything else especially the hard disk. The bios tries each device in that list in the order you arrange them UNTIL it finds something to boot from. NOTE: IF you have an external usb cdrom drive you can plug it in and boot from it too by moving it up the list.
IF you did not do it that way then that is the problem.

Now assuming it still does not work it could possibly be several things.

a. the bios.
IF this is the problem then you'll need to flash it and update it. Problem is you need an external usb floppy to do that. Note this is probably the least likely thing that could be the cause.
The current bios version can be found in the top left corner of the POST screen (the screen full of white text that scrolls right after you power up. What shows there is the Clevo bios version though not the original bios it was based on. There may be other ways but the only way I know of getting that is with the windows system information tool (Start->all programs->accessories->system tools) under the System info property (Of course that does you little good).
[4/26/2008 edit] I forgot to mention before that by default you may not be able to see the post screen. To fix that in the bios is a setting to show diagnostic screen. Set it to enable. That turns off the mgr bitmap screen that hides the post screen (ie sager screen or whomever).

b. the cd/dvd rom drive is borderline defective.
Yes I know you said earlier that you can read from the cd/dvd drive but I have a system at work that acts exactly the way you describe here.
It has a borderline dvd drive and it reads in windows BUT the system will NOT boot from it. It "starts" to boot then goes to a black screen. IF I try enough times it may actually start to boot BUT before it can load the windows xp on the ubcd it blue screens claiming that files are missing. So, I attach an external usb cd drive when I need to ghost it. It boots fine from some "other" cdrom just not the internal dvd drive.

c. The hard disk "might" be interferring with the boot process. I know it sounds weird but I've seen that too, where a hard disk became defective and until I excluded it from the boot process it would not allow the cd/dvd drive to boot the system. It would hang things up.
Note that unformatted under this topic is the same as defective because the system won't find either a boot block on it or readable sectors.
SO you can also try going to the bios and selecting the boot tab and moving your hard disk from the top Boot Priority part to the bottom Exclude list part and see if that will allow the cd/dvd drive to boot.

So there are several things here to try.
1. get the boot order in the bios right if it's not.
2. try excluding your hard disk(S) (all of them)
3. bios upgrade
4. Try attaching an external cd/dvd drive and booting from it (after moving it to the top of the bios boot priority menu).
Note: my bet is on the last one, actually.