Boot From CD

[Peter]

I recently got a new CD-RW/DVD drive for my Dell laptop to replace the
original CD-RW drive it came with. The new drive works OK with one
exception: I can not boot from it using a bootable CD. If I switch back
to the original CD-RW drive I can boot from it.

The orignal CD-RW drive is a Matshita UJDA310 and the new CD-RW/DVD drive
is the Teac DW-224E.

Any ideas what might be causing this - why I can't boot from the new drive
- and what to do about it?

(FYI: There's no info about the new drive on the Teac web site. I do
have the laptop BIOS set to boot from CD.)

Peter

 

[Peter]

Probably going into the BIOS and enabling that particular drive to be the
BOOT device would do it... More than likely, your OTHER drive is set up as
the BOOT device of choice.. If you have these 2 devices on separate ide
cables, rather than together on 1, just switch the drives on the cables if
you don't wanna go into the BIOS.. ( i guess a combo drive such as you have
with dvd and rw capabalities can be bootable device, i really am not sure)

 

[Peter]

Maybe I'm not following your point but let me clarify a couple of things.
This is a *laptop* PC so there so there aren't any IDE cables to speak of.
The CD drive in this laptop is in a removeable "media bay" and only one
device can be in the bay at a time. As I said in my original message, the
laptop's BIOS is set to boot from the CD drive first.

With the original CD-RW drive in the media bay I am able to boot from a
bootable CD. With the new CD-RW/DVD drive in the media bay I can not boot
from a bootable CD. (Everything else about the new drive seems to be
working OK though.)

Any ideas on what the problem could be?

Peter

 

[Peter]

Is the new drive recognised correctly in the bios.

I don't know. How do I tell for sure? It does play/record CD's and play
DVD's so I *assume* the BIOS is happy with it.

Also see if there is a firmware update for the new drive.

I have not been able to find much information about this drive let alone a
firmware update. This model (Teac DW-224E) is not even mentioned on the
Teac web site. It's probably an OEM model

or a bios update from the laptop maker.

I have the latest BIOS but this laptop and its BIOS are about 3 years old.
Dell has not updated the BIOS in almost 2 years.