To boot from a CD/DVD disk does it have to be on the Primary IDE cable?

I have tried as Master on the secondary IDE and it is not found at boot-up. (The drive is but the disk is not)

To check that I did have a good bootable CD I tried with Win98 CD (yes this is a bootable CD). At boot-up this was only found when inserted into the drive set as slave on the Primary IDE. Am I doing something wrong? (what's new in that you say :rolleyes: ) Or is this the only way to run a boot CD/DVD?

I can sya I have booted successfully from both My CD-RW and my DVD drives, both of which are located on the secondary IDE channel.

Just a guess but it might be the BIOS is only capable of booting from the primary IDE.

I Agree with it being a Bios problem

However it is more likely that the Boot order needs to be set
And the autodetect should also be checked.
While your at it double check the drives jumper setting M/S/C


If your Bios has the boot order listed ide-0 ide-1 cdrom floppy
select ide-1 first ide-0 second
Then it should boot off what ever drive on the second channel has a bootable disk in it

I will go in and change the BIOS later thanks.

At present I have tried
First boot CD / Seconds boot Floppy / third HDD-0

At boot-up this was only found when inserted into the drive set as slave on the Primary IDE

As long as the drive is correctly jumpered and detected in Windows (or the bios) during or after boot up - it is hard to understand why it would boot from one channel and not the other one - unless there is some conflict in Device Manager etc, etc.

Obviously if the drive is not recognised in the BIOS then you are not going to be able to boot from it.

Paul
That is what puzzles me.
At boot up both CD drvies are recognised and if I boot with a floppy both drives are avaible.
Drives are correctly jumpered and work perfectly in windows.
No conflicts or erros in device manager.
The bios shows both CD drives in their correct locations.

At present I have tried
First boot CD / Seconds boot Floppy / third HDD-0
That really is strange Ernie...as mentioned, I've set my bios to Boot from CD first (just as you did above), and have booted successfully from Pri, Sec, master, Slave...well, you name it.

Sounds silly I know, but maybe try another CD that is an absolute sure fire bootable CD...Possibly just a problem with that one CD? :confused:

I will make a recue boot cd using either Bart's or ebcd to check out with them.

Are they both newer optical drives? Not all CD ROM drives are able to be boot drives.

Just an observation - but just yesterday I tried a BartCD in a pc brought to me with a spyware problem. It wasn't recognised at boot-up on that PC but worked perfectly well on my own PC's ATAPI CD and DVD drives. It was a CDRW medium and when the same iso was burned to a CDR it was recognised OK. Certainly older/different burners can often be finnicky about reading CDs written on another burner.

It still seems weird that the same physical drive can operate as slave but not as master - that is correct isn't it?

No harm to clean the lens.

Came across a thread in another forum (http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=318416) and it looks similar. Only works in IDE 1 or 2 not in 3 or 4. So it looks like the BIOS could be the answer, with presumably a different controller on the second channel. Doubtful if updating the BIOS would make any difference.

And ... are you 100% sure that the jumper settings (http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000217.htm) are correct.

I realize this thread is a couple months old, but I was looking for a solution to this problem, couldn't find it, and then figured it out.. at least for this particular machine.

This was a Dell Dimension 4100 that wouldn't boot from either optical on the secondary channel. I swapped the drives, I tried a third drive, I upgraded the bios, I switched around the boot order.. all that stuff. Then I realized that the boot order only had IDE-HDD. There was no distinction for primary or secondary. I also noted that the only choice for an optical boot was ATAPI CD-ROM.

I went into the configuration for the master optical on the secondary and changed it from 'AUTO' to 'ATAPI - other'. (the two ATAPI choices were that one and 'ATAPI-removable'). It booted right up from the CD. I guess that setting forced the drive to be recognized as one of the choices on the boot menu.

Hope this helps.