Problems booting from CD/DVD drive

SpringsteenFan

Beta member
Messages
3
Hi,

I have a Medion MD5950 laptop, dual booted with XP Home SP2/SuSE 8.2.

My problem is as follows: When I attempt to boot from CD/DVD, the light comes on as if the system is trying to read it, but it does not boot. The BIOS shows everything to be in order (CD/DVD > Ext. device > hard drive). When I navigate through the screens, I'm not able to make any changes to the listing for the CD/DVD drive..it says "Installed CD/DVD Drive". On the screen where I can select the boot order, there is the following:

CD/DVD Drive
External Device
+ Hard Drive

Focusing on Hard Drive and hitting enter, this entry is expanded to show the make/model of the HD. This does not happen to the CD/DVD drive. One other note: I borrowed a USB floppy drive from a friend. When going to this screen in this case, External Device was expandable (designated by the plus sign) and gave the info about the floppy. I haven't yet been able to test with an external CD drive.

I updated the BIOS with the latest update from the mfr's website.

This has happened with several different bootable CDs (XP, SuSE 9.1,
Knoppix), all of which boot perfectly on all my other machines.

The one exception: Booting from the manufacturer's rescue disk. This works.

I get a text menu from XP with the option to boot either from the HD or the CD/DVD. The weird part? Going into the DOS prompt, the CD/DVD drive is listed as A:, the second HD partition shows as C:. They're F: and D: respectively in XP. (this laptop has no floppy)

The manufacturer's support department claims that they don't do anything to disable CD booting from other CDs, but I'm skeptical.

I'm looking to do a long overdue flush/reinstall of the system, but don't
really want to reinstall all the preloaded crap that came with the laptop. There were directories and rescue files that came with the laptop which I backed up to CD.

I'd alo like to test out different Linux distros (note: the initial SuSE
install was done through FTP, but I'd prefer using CDs.

One other note: Other than this boot problem, the drive works perfectly well.

Has anyone run across this in the past? Thanks.
 
Does your comp. show a sign of a slow down? My guess is that a virus...And don't quote me on this but some how changed the letter to :A

Can you manually change the drive letter in properties..?

Seems that a virus Got onto one of the partitions, most likely the one that has the programs on it, My only guess is that since it is a laptop,

is their any other computer you could use to setup a Temp. network, and have the other computer scan the drives of your laptop?
 
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