Cant get a laptop to boot from CD...

[ClassicRed]

Someone gave my dad a laptop yesterday and of course it has alot of random useless things on it he will never use so I want to reformat it...I have never had an issue where I cant get a pc to boot from CD but this one is makin me -.-;!

I have opend up the bios(F2 wtf) and changed boot drive to CD-DVD Rom(opened it again to verify it saved and it did), I have pressed F12 and selected CD-DVD Rom drive to boot from..both times pc reboots, loads XP logo screen then after about 10mins boots up to current login screen -.o

Dell Inspiron 8200
P4 2.50GHz
60gig hd
1gigoram
nvidia geforce 4 go
cddvdrw

I know the CD works or did last time I used it which was 3months ago....Only difference is desktop vs laptop..D: Im prob missing something that has to do with silly name brand laptops but I dunno what it is ._.

[The Stig]

Did you get the message "push any key to boot from CD" ?

[ClassicRed]

Did you get the message "push any key to boot from CD" ?

No never got that option

[Mafai]

the cd isnt being detected as bootable / the cdrom is broken / or the boot order did not save correctly.

[ClassicRed]

Boot order saved fine....cd works fine on other pc......laptop will not load this cd...I put in a dvd last night and it did fine...put in this one when its booted up and nothing..its like anti format D:

[Mafai]

Boot order saved fine....cd works fine on other pc......laptop will not load this cd...I put in a dvd last night and it did fine...put in this one when its booted up and nothing..its like anti format D:

is it a legit cd? some cd-roms dont like certain burns. could be it.

[ClassicRed]

At this point Im thinking something happen to the CDROM and the DVD was a fluke ~ Every CD I put in it now it just makes funny noises(like the eye is moving and cant find the cd) and I now notice a burn like mark across the tray so...ya :3 nice give away but pretty stuck with wuts on it....

[Blubbartron]

Assuming the BIOS supports booting from USB, there's no reason you can't put a copy of your OS of choice on a formatted flash drive that's been made bootable. I did it the other day to put windows 7 on the laptop I'm making this post from. There's quite a few guides out there on how to do it, but the way I did it required vista on a machine you have access to. Gotta use diskpart from dos to format the flash drive, then xcopy the OS files directly to the drive.

[Ikith]

Assuming the BIOS supports booting from USB, there's no reason you can't put a copy of your OS of choice on a formatted flash drive that's been made bootable. I did it the other day to put windows 7 on the laptop I'm making this post from. There's quite a few guides out there on how to do it, but the way I did it required vista on a machine you have access to. Gotta use diskpart from dos to format the flash drive, then xcopy the OS files directly to the drive.

Unrelated question
Does this make the flash drive look like a cd in windows as well?

[Kohan]

Although you've already determined the drive to be faulty, I should just throw this out there in case anyone else comes upon this thread in the future.

A commonly overlooked problem relating to optical laptop drives, particularly ones from the early 00's or later, is their inability to read your average CD/DVD-R. Oftentimes, the laser simply can't pick up the data on lesser quality discs, and will either read them very slowly, or never at all.

To get around this, you should either use better media (e.g., Verbatim), eject and reinsert the disc repeatedly, or make another burn and hope for the best.

[Blubbartron]

Unrelated question
Does this make the flash drive look like a cd in windows as well?

If by "look like a CD" you mean inserting the flash drive causes an autorun of the setup feature, then yes, it does. But flash drives are already treated as removable media by OS's due to the removable bit being set. Anytime you plug one in it prompts you to select something, or autoruns what you've selected for it to do previously. Now that it's a bootable drive, it looks on its personal boot sector to see what program should be loaded, just like a CD does.

[Ikith]

If by "look like a CD" you mean inserting the flash drive causes an autorun of the setup feature, then yes, it does. But flash drives are already treated as removable media by OS's due to the removable bit being set. Anytime you plug one in it prompts you to select something, or autoruns what you've selected for it to do previously. Now that it's a bootable drive, it looks on its personal boot sector to see what program should be loaded, just like a CD does.

Unfortunately the flash drive does not totally autorun like a cd if it still looks like a flash drive (Trust me I've tried. A project in our security plus class was to hack each others computer and I tried making an autorun that would instantly dump password hashes to itself so I could go home and brute force them over night). Which is why I'm wondering if it totally looks like a cd. If it still looks like a usb drive when in windows the autorun won't autorun like its intended to do.

I'm just curious at this point though.

[Blubbartron]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you'd need to write a batch file to do the dump then make the boot sector of the flash drive point to it. That should accomplish what you want. But it really does make it act like a CD. When I put Windows 7 on it after making it bootable and plugging it in, it acted exactly the same as if the .iso I downloaded was loaded up onto daemon tools. (which I did to accommodate the xcopy)