I can't seem to get the computer to boot from the CD when both hard drives are running.


I have two drives installed: a SATA (my new HD) and an IDE (my old HD). My goal is to boot from a Live CD and restore a backup from an external HD to the SATA drive.

If I set the BIOS to disable the SATA drive, then I can boot to the IDE drive, or interrupt it by pressing F12, and booting from my CD. (I use the Ultimate Boot CD, which includes BartPE and DIXML). Of course, with the SATA drive disabled I can't use it in any way.

However, if the SATA drive is enabled, and I use F12 and tell it to boot from the CD drive, it still boots from the SATA drive instead. If I press F2 and set the boot sequence in the BIOS to boot from the CD drive first, I get the error message "Strike F1 to retry boot". And of course when I press F1, I get the message again.

Similarly, there seems to be no way to boot from the IDE drive as long as the SATA drive is enabled.

What should I do next?

Ihad a problem similar to that with a Dell XPS MB. I couldn't get into the Boot Order menu. I finally resolved it by taking out the CMOS battery and I also set the motherboard jumper to clear CMOS. You need to take the battery out for a good 5 minutes. (maybe less time would have done it but who knows?)

As long as you didn't make a lot of changes in your BIOS, it shouldn't cause any problems. You will have to reset the clock and calendar most likely.

I hope this helps.


DR

I guess that I don't understand why you don't just change the boot order in the BIOS...to reflect the optical drive as #1.

Don't really know why you are using this F12 key to interrupt booting and then make changes or attempt to do such.

Louis

Have you checked the CD to make sure its bootable.. If the computer does not find a bootable volume in the drive it moves on to the next drive in the list.

I did, as I described above. That's what I did when I pressed F2: set the CD drive to boot first. And as I said, I get the error message "Strike F1 to retry boot"


Yes. As I described above, I use the Ultimate Boot CD, which works fine when the SATA drive is disabled but is ignored when the SATA is enabled. Basically, it boots to the SATA drive no matter what other drives are active.

Two.



Of course not! That would be silly, wouldn't it? It shouldn't make a difference.



Fine I'll try it.

Oh.

Okay, you were right. It won't boot from the lower CD drive.

Why wouldn't it make a difference?

So you got it working? Guess we should have asked how many drives you had

Well, you know how the computer will first look for a floppy in the A: drive, and then a disk in the CD drive? I assumed that if it didn't find one it would look in the OTHER CD drive, and then go on to the hard drive. It seemed logical to me.