Dell CPi 266Mhz 64MB Ram - Won't Boot From CD!?!?

You must have a working hard drive in the system to use the CD - the two share a channel.  Without a hard drive, you will not be able to use the CD drive.

 I'm not sure if you canor cant see the message i posted i seem to be having issues with this site and IE 9....

Anyway with firefox at hand... here is what i was supposed to have said before...

Hello all

I've got a Dell Latitude CPi laptop here with BIOS version A09.

It refuses to boot from a CD no matter what


Things i have tried:

Changing boot device order to anything and everything i can including CD drive... Nothing worked

Changing the CD drive for another i purchased... Nothing

Tried Windows XP, 2000, 98 CD's... Nothing

Tried Linux Live CD's... Nothing

Tried booting from PCMCIA LAN Device... Nothing


I'm really stumped! One thing i have noted is that the laptop does not have a hard disk or caddy in it, would no hard disk being present effect the ability to boot from a CD on this model?!

The error i get is:

"Primary hard disk drive 0 not found

No bootable device(s) selected

 Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup"

Many older systems will not boot from CD - this being a very old one, it may well not.

That explains things!

thanks for your help