CD drive not recognizing boot CDs other than Windows

[IKnowNot]

Are you sure you burned the disk properly and did not just copy the .iso to the disk?

[Vood00]

Hye metguru,

The cd that you are trying to intall from, is that cd burned from the ISO image of the linux distro or an cd dump of that distro?

If you have copied the linux distro cd on to your harddisk and then burned the cd then it will not boot from that cd because when the system boots from any drive it look for the boot sector information in the first tack of the boot media so if the cd dumped and then burned it will not work.

[metguru]

yea, I tried it on my desktop and it worked fine, and the burn speed is lower than the drive can read, so it can't be the CD.

Relyt sounds like his answer might work, but I don't know how to check the HD partitions, as I have a bootable Partition Logic CD, but that doesn't work on this laptop.

[metguru]

OK, no one seemed to reply to the post, lol, so I read over it again, and forgot to call dell. I called them, after about 45 min, a person picks up the phone, obviously not from the US. I explained my situation, he told me to hold, so he could 'research' for the answer...8 minutes later, all he was able to do was explain to me how to boot from a CD. When I told him I knew how to do this, he had me hold for another 5 minutes, and then he told me to hold the function key while pressing the power button. (then he hung up on me) This loaded a diagnostics program by dell. btw, has anyone ever seen this program? (it was totally new to me) I had the program test the CD drive. It told me the CD in the drive had no data (it was the Ubuntu CD), so I had to put another one in to continue. Obviously no errors came up after the CD was switched, because it passed the problem by doing that.

...RelyT's explaination is seeming to become more and more logical to me...

anyway, I was thinking, is it possible to boot from a network? I've read about this, but have never done it, and have no idea how hard this is to do.

[brokencrow]

...the problem is it's an Inspiron. One of my buds has one that only take Win98 or ME. Just won't take W2K or XP. It's a PIII unit with plenty of RAM. Inspiron: they don't come much flakier.

[Relyt]

Good Day Mate,

brokencrow has a good point there. To elaborate a little based upon suppositions.... ...anyway. During the initial boot of that box it went to the first partition, that was the 0-partition (39MB of Dell Utilities and files). After agreeing to this and that and pressing enter...from that point on it would boot to Windows via the 1-partition which contained the MBR and all was well. I would suppose that all those instructions and the contents of 0-partition went gonzo when you formated the bugger. There is some discussion regarding the value of that partition after the laptop's first boot, however I’d skip the debate and simply restore that partition and it’s files and then give it a go again, making sure I didn’t make it go bye-bye again.

Anyway here’s a link that describes the process and the critical files necessary to get the bugger back up. (Paragraph 6 – 7 addresses which files etc.)

http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/recreate.htm

[metguru]

but the Dell utility partition is what I booted from when I hit the Function + Power, isn't it? So wouldn't that mean that its already there?