Bootable CD ROM Drive

[Bruce Lee]

I've got an old CDROM drive (6/7 years) in an old PC which doesn't boot when
"Boot from CDROM" is set in BIOS. Is this because of BIOS or do some CDROM
drives just not want to boot? The reason for this is I want to use the old
drive with a new system and need it to boot a WinXP cd or Linux cd.

 

[old jon]

I've got an old CDROM drive (6/7 years) in an old PC which doesn't boot
when
"Boot from CDROM" is set in BIOS. Is this because of BIOS or do some CDROM
drives just not want to boot? The reason for this is I want to use the old
drive with a new system and need it to boot a WinXP cd or Linux cd.

Some nice guy recently mentioned `forceaspi` in one of the newsgroups.
Google for it, and see if it helps.
best wishes..OJ

 

[Pen]

You might check as to how the drive is connected.
Is it on an IDE hard drive type cable, or is its data
cable attached to the sound card? Most early cd drives
required proprietary controllers and weren't bootable.

 

[kony]

I've got an old CDROM drive (6/7 years) in an old PC which doesn't boot when
"Boot from CDROM" is set in BIOS. Is this because of BIOS or do some CDROM
drives just not want to boot? The reason for this is I want to use the old
drive with a new system and need it to boot a WinXP cd or Linux cd.

Being able to boot from a CD is a specification that many
drives didn't support, a feature they didn't have around 7
years ago. That was about the borderline for support of the
feature, some did and others didn't... those most did up
until 8 years ago. If I had to guess on a rough age/speed
of drive that (corresponded to an age and technological
evolution that usually) supported it, that'd be 20X speed or
higher drives.

For XP you can just partition and format a drive partition
as fat32 and copy the i386 folder from the CD to it, then
boot to dos (run smartdrive to speed it up) and run the
Winnt setup program.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/13897/13897.html?Ad=1
If you want XP running from NTFS, I suggest making an
additional partition as FAT32... you could convert it later
but less risk to start out with the filesystem you wanted.

 

[Mike Walsh]

There are several bootable CDROM formats. An older PC might boot with one format, but not another.

 

[SteveH]

I've got an old CDROM drive (6/7 years) in an old PC which doesn't boot
when
"Boot from CDROM" is set in BIOS. Is this because of BIOS or do some CDROM
drives just not want to boot? The reason for this is I want to use the old
drive with a new system and need it to boot a WinXP cd or Linux cd.

May just be too old to be a bootable one. Wouldn't it be easier to buy a new
CD Drive as they are so cheap?

SteveH

 

[George Hester]

May just be too old to be a bootable one. Wouldn't it be easier to buy a new
CD Drive as they are so cheap?

SteveH

Yeah sometimes they are in Office Max up front on a table real cheap. I
bought a 52x CD-Writer Kyperion from them for $20.00 bucks. It had really
ugly packaging. Darn thing is better then the CD-Writer I bought years ago
for well over a hundred and was only 8x. It can be used with a bootable CD.

 

[Bruce Lee]

I've checked a few old ones with a new motherboard - like someone said
previously I think if a drive is made earlier than 1996/7 then it's unlikely
to be bootable.