Can't Boot from CD tried everyting?

gmcjetpilot

Baseband Member
Messages
22
Dell OptiPlex GX260. The Hard Drive that is formatted I think, bought a new used one one.

I have the BIOS set to boot from:
CD,
A:
hard drive

During boot it says can't find primary drive. I can get it to find the A: drive. On the BIOS setup it says CD drive not installed (it was working before I took the original hard drive out). The Hard drive shows and gives the size.

I checked the jumper, cables and nothing. I was able to get it to boot from the Win XP CD drive at one time but something has happened. I am tempted to pull another hard drive out of another computer.
 
try pulling out the cd drive from another computer first.

one thing you need to know is that some computers is set to not to boot from anything else then the recovery cd.
i had a laptop that i should repair. it wont boot from anything ether, but when i inserted the recovery cd, it booted perfectly.
it was an HP. dell and HP is a lot like each other. they kinda want to controlle what you do and not do on there computers.
 
Hi,

Try with New Window CD.
I had heard that but I only have two CD's and they both are copies that came with the refurb computers years ago (the computers both have the Microsoft product codes on the case and registered to me).
 
oops.
i am sorry that i did not read your first post carefully anoth.
i thought that the only thing you was saying was that you can not boot from cd. and nothing about the HDD.
forget my last post.

are you using an IDE cable.
if so:
is it a dual cable. (both HDD and CD drive in one cable)
if so: try setting both cd drive and HDD to cable select. the first input on the cable goes to the HDD, and the end of the cable goes to the cd drive.
if dont work: try with another ide input on the motherboard. (btw, the blue input in the cable goes to the motherboard)
still nothing:
try 2 single cables. set the HDD to master and the CD drive to cable select. if that dont work: try setting the Cd drive to slave.
still nothing:
then try to swap the 2 ends of the ide cable to eche others ports on the motherboard. one of the ide ports on the motherboard is the premier port.
the try the thing above again.
 
check doeas de drives work alone.. check only hdd and then check only Cd drive...

sorry for my spelling.. not wery good at it and also in a rush
 
oops.
are you using an IDE cable.
if so:
is it a dual cable. (both HDD and CD drive in one cable)
if so: try setting both cd drive and HDD to cable select. the first input on the cable goes to the HDD, and the end of the cable goes to the cd drive.
if dont work: try with another ide input on the motherboard. (btw, the blue input in the cable goes to the motherboard)
still nothing:
try 2 single cables. set the HDD to master and the CD drive to cable select. if that dont work: try setting the Cd drive to slave.
still nothing:
then try to swap the 2 ends of the ide cable to eche others ports on the motherboard. one of the ide ports on the motherboard is the premier port.
the try the thing above again.

Something else to look at is the number of wires in your cable. If it is an older CD drive I have found that it can have issues with the 80 wire ones that most hard drives require, it took me three hours of swearing at my server to figure out why it wasn't recognizing my CD drive. Try using one of the 40 wire ones instead. (Sorry for my lack of technical terminology, I'm not really much of a hardware guy)

Also, does your BIOS allow you to boot from USB? because if you can do that just make a bootable flash drive with the disk image from one of the boot CD's you are using, that usually saves me a lot of headache, but doesnt work on older motherboards.
 
Well I left it, and found out some HOW?? The BIOS setting was wrong... THE CD was there but selected as secondary? ... Not 100% sure I had a guy at the computer store for $50 find it!... Oh well loaded Win XP and works like a champ.
 
Back
Top Bottom