just for fun, i had 2 geeky projects for an old laptop (released 10 years ago). i discovered the dvd-rom could not be booted from, i am curious to know why. the dvd-rom has a button to easily remove and replace with a floppy disk drive, which can be booted from. i attached a screenshot of the bios boot section. i dont know much about hardware. i tried searching online, but to no avail. i never post in forums for stuff like this ordinarily.
Is this a Dell... Not that the ATAPI CD ROM is specific to Dell, it's not, but the removable DVD/Floppy deal you mentioned. There was also a CD ROM available that would be bootable. On a system this old I doubt you will get it to boot from DVD. Possibly you could get it to boot from a USB flash drive if that helps... What are you wanting to do?
not a dell, it is Ergo. this is not about trying to achieve something, i had to geek my way around the various issues (couldnt boot from any external media for example). i really just want to know why it doesnt boot from the dvd drive. at post, it registers both drives, but next to the second, it says "none", same as the bios boot shows. seems very strange to me. it was a laptop used in a university (college), so it was thoroughly altered i am sure.
The problem being the BIOS is older than DVD drive specs, so it doesn't get picked up as an ATAPI CD ROM... I've run into this on desktop machines also.
haha i had to boot from floppy, i put a bootloader thing on there, i was given the option to boot from other types of external media, and chose usb flash drive, which worked nicely. i wanted to hack the university (college) secured windows, i also wanted to install and customise a linux OS. that was my fun project stuff.
it was an old uni computer, no longer in use by them. when i did the floppy-to-usb boot thing, i installed a linux OS, meaning i could do what i wanted to files on the Windows partition.. i hacked from there on
