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Thread: CD drive not recognizing boot CDs other than Windows

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  1. November 11th, 2006, 05:27 PM #1
    metguru
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    I actually thought about calling them, but I wasn't sure if they'd help with that type of problem.
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  2. November 12th, 2006, 01:20 PM #2
    Vood00
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    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.
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  3. November 12th, 2006, 05:38 PM #3
    metguru
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    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.
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  4. November 17th, 2006, 03:53 AM #4
    brokencrow
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    ...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.
    “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” — Will Rogers
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  6. November 17th, 2006, 04:23 AM #5
    Relyt
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    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
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