Boot Problems with CD Drive

September 30, 2006 9:00 AM

My Dell Inspiron 5100 Laptop will not boot from any burned Live CDs, and in Windows XP the CDs appear blank. Other computers will load from the same LiveCDs, and my laptop will boot from the Dell diagnostic CD that came with the computer. Please help.

I am afraid that the CDRW/DVD drive, a Matshita UJDA740, might be broken.

posted by billtron to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Have you tried other CDs (audio, software, ect.) in the drive? This would tell you if it's the drive or the disc. Some notebooks have removable bays and you will get unexpected playback if the CD bay is not entirely inserted (but sometimes it will still play). Pop out the bay and lighty but firmly push it back in (power down or eject the device first). What happens when you try to boot to the live CD? Does your laptop even try to read it or does it just boot into Windows as usual? If it attempts to read it but stalls, maybe the disc (Knoppix, WinPE, ect.) doesn't have the proper drivers. I would assume if your notebook booted into your Dell Diagnostics CD that you've set the correct boot order.
posted by bda1972 at 9:23 AM on September 30, 2006

Did you burn these live CDs yourself all using the same program? Can you successfully burn non-boot disks? Possibly trying a different burning program would yield better results, or even simply slowing down the burn rate.

One possibility is that you're just burning the ISO like data instead of burning the actual disk image. In Nero, for example, if you just create a typical data disk and add the ISO file to the compilation, it won't be bootable -- you have to specifically choose "DVD-ROM (Boot)" as the mode (or go to file>open and select the ISO file).
posted by camcgee at 12:30 PM on September 30, 2006

Response by poster: I burned the iso onto two CDs, on two different computers, one using burnatonce, and the other using DeepBurner. Both ISO CDs boot on other computers, and neither boots on the computer in question. The computer will read other data and audio CDs that I have burned, as well as commercial data Ds.

When I try to boot into the Live CD, my computer waits a few seconds, and the light on the CD drive lights up, but then the computer boots to Windows automatically. Then, when I look at the LiveCD in Windows, it says that the CD has 700MB of free space.

I can't find any other documentation of this problem online. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
posted by billtron at 8:28 AM on October 1, 2006