WIndows XP boot from CD fails

[NRGeti]

Does anyone have a suggestion to get boot from a CD working on Windows XP?

I set my BIOS to boot from CDROM first but it doesn't work. Is there anything else I can do?

I have a Pine Motherboard, Model P450-4000, and three CD drives with a SCSI interface.

Once in a while I have seen a message during boot to click a key to switch to CD boot but usually I just get a "Failure" message.

 

[mainegeek]

Have you tried boot from scsi?

 

[NRGeti]

Hmmm. How do I boot from SCSI?

 

[bcastner]

Are all three CD devices on the SCSI chain, nothing on an IDE channel?

Look to your BIOS to change boot order for your devices. It should show removable devices as an option. Make these primary in the boot order.

 

[l3reacher]

If your CD is not original, then usually it won't work, unless someone copied "CD to CD" or by burning the CD as a bootable cd.

Whatever you do, be nice to to people who helps you or try their best to make things better for you.

 

[NRGeti]

Thanks for your replies. I am always nice to people who help me and try to respond when I get an answer.

(An aside thought: This forum does not seem to allow indented replies which prevents answering individual emails. I have to attach my replies to the last email in the list.)

Here is the exact configuration of my PC:
One CD drive is attached to the SCSI board.
Two CD drives are attached directly to the IDE connector on the motherboard. One is a DVD drive; the other is a CD-R.

I spent several hours this weekend numerous combinations of my BIOS and SCSI configurations. I discovered the option to boot from CDROM or SCSI. The SCSI option did not work. In any case, the DVD drive booted from the CD on one of the combinations.

I reset all of the parameters back to when the boot would fail and was still able to boot. I have no idea why it now works! If I discover any additional facts, I will post them here.

Right now I need to trash my hard drive and do a fresh install of Windows XP; it has broken down and caused me a great deal of grief.