booting from cd-rom not working - bios set correctly

[Guest]

i am trying to boot from my cd-rom, with no success. i changed the settings
in bios so that the cd-rom is the 1st boot option. the light for the drive
goes on, but the disk never spins. the cd-rom drive was working when i used
it from within windows. i tried this with a couple of disks - one being a
system restore disk which i am pretty positive would be a bootable disk.
what am i doing wrong/what am i missing? are there other bios setting that i
need to check? help please (and just fyi - i need to boot from the cd
because i mucked with an xp system file and cannot start windows at all)
thx - susan

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Your CD-ROM needs to be bootable.

 

[Dave B.]

Some drives I have noticed have difficulty booting, do you have a second
drive you could use?

 

[Yves Leclerc]

To boot from CD Rom, some PCs require the CD ROM drive to be set as an IDE
master drive (usually on Secondary IDE channel.) If a CD ROM drive is set to
"slave' drive, this may be the case for your PC.

 

[Guest]

the cd rom drive is indeed a slave drive! I will try playing with this later
tonite and see if this addresses the issue - thanks!

 

[Guest]

installing the cd-rom drive as the master drive did the trick!! THANKS!!!
Susan