Switching off floppy boot

[xwb]

My brother has a Dell 866 LR. He's trying to load a new OS from DVD. In the BIOS boot sequence, he's got

ATAPI CDROM
ARM HDD
IDE HDD

The ARM FDD and Floppy are disabled. When he tries to boot from the DVD, it tries to access the floppy.

The DVD can be booted from on other machines: just not this one. I've asked him to rerecord the DVD at the lowest possible speed: still no joy.

The hard disk has XP on it.

Any idea why it is trying to access the floppy when it is switched off?

 

[G0AOZ]

If the XP installation is still good, boot up and see if Windows can read the DVD, or any other DVD/CD.

The symptoms suggest that maybe the DVD drive is not working/unable to read the disk.

Can you swap the DVD drive for a known good one?

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[xwb]

If he boots up in XP, he can read the DVD. What's strange is that it doesn't try to boot from the hard disk if, presumably, it fails to boot from DVD. It goes straight to floppy.

 

[BadBigBen]

in that case have him move the FDD below the HDD in the Boot order...

also is the build in DVD connected through IDE or SATA? if it is a SATA drive, then of course it will not boot from the DVD, as he has the IDE CD-Rom in the Boot Order...


Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[xwb]

It is a 866MHz PIII so I think pretty old. At a guess SATA wasn't invented yet. Anyway, he didn't mention anything about SATA: just IDE. The only CD/DVD is some ATAPI thing.

 

[G0AOZ]

Ok, a couple of things to try...

Note any custom settings, then clear CMOS. Preferably remove the battery and wait a few minutes to make sure it's completely dead. Then replace battery, reset date and time etc.

How is the DVD being cabled up? Separate IDE i/face, or sharing with the hard drive? If sharing, make sure both DVD and HDD are either set to CS, or HDD is Master and DVD is Slave. Put HDD at the end of the cable and DVD in the 'middle'. If you're using separate cables, ensure the drives are both on the respective end connectors, and both are set as Master.

If we're talking ancient here, I assume the BIOS will support a DVD...?

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[xwb]

Thanks - I'll tell him to give those ideas a try. Problem is I'm on GMT and he's on Central Time so most of the communication is by email.

 

[xwb]

It is looking very much like it is not bootable from CD. Think I'll have to send him a podcast of how to swap the cables round. Thanks for the tips.

 

[BadBigBen]

well, now that I know that it is a PIII system, I agree with G0AOZ on how to proceed further...

Alternatively, he could try to replace the DVD-ROM with a known working one, or purchase a new one, they are cheap enough these days...

PS: FYI, Pentium III's where produced from early 1999 to 2003, and SATA was developed in 2000, drives where sold from 2001 onwards, though SATA CD/DVD ROMs only appeared at a relative later time (2007+ (?))...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"