Vostro 200 will NOT boot from CD/DVD

What OS is on the CD/DVD? And what's on the hard drive? There have been issues about booting the V200 from a Vista disk if another OS had been installed on the hard drive.

 

Open the case and verify that the optical drive is connected to SATA1 connector on the motherboard, assuming you have only 1 hard drive and one optical drive. Then run BIOS setup and make sure SATA1 is set to enabled and the optical drive is first in the boot sequences. Save the changes, put the OS disk in the drive and close the drawer. Exit setup and it should boot from the optical disk.

 

Ron 

 

 

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Here is the manual <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell> for installing drives in the V200. Verify that you've done it correctly and make sure the SATA port is turned on in BIOS.

 

Ron 

If you format the hard drive, you'll delete the hidden Restore partition and the Utilities partition, so think twice about that...

 

I suppose it's possible you have a bad CD drive...

 

Ron 

The optical drive is good, it might be a compatablility issue with the motherboard though. The OS that's on the hard-drive is useless anyways, it wont finish booting to it, and even if it did it still has so much useless stuff on it that it'd be more work than it's worth.

Stupid me, I bet that's the problem. I have the optical drive hooked up to the SATA-2 port, it should be hooked up to SATA-4. Thank you, I'm about to... nevermind, I just hooked the optical drive up to SATA-4 and I'm still having the same issue, I'm going to try to format the Hard Drive, that way it has no where to boot from. I'll keep you posted. From what I know, the hard-drive has a ghosted copy of windows xp pro on it. I guess I still can't complain considering everything I've got for it was free except for the processor. If I can't get it to boot within a week or two I'm just going to buy a high-end motherboard and trash this one. By the way, I've tried several boot disks, none have worked. I've tried Ubuntu x64 and x86, Windows MCE, Windows XP Pro, and XP Home.

Unplug the Hard-Drive, let the system boot, it should automatically go to the boot disc. Once it boots simply plug in the SATA cable and format the drive. Problem Solved!