Optiplex GX240 wont boot from CD

Question

Got some messed up Windows so I'm attempting to reinstall from orginal Dell Win 2000 CD.  When I look at the boot order in setup it doesn't even show a CD.  Reflashed the bios to latest download for a GX240 (A05).  That ran fine off the floppy.  Checked the physical connection of CD and its fine.  Put a reformatted 80 GB HD in to replace orginal HD to see if the boot would see CD but still no way to boot from CD.  Used W2K floppy dics to get process started but after disc 4 it prompts for CD which of course it doesn't see.  Any ideas of what else the issue could be.  Setup doesn't even show a CD so I'm not sure swapping out CD's would do much good.  Thanks

BBraxton · Answer

I got tangled in a similar situation which I was (in my case) able to solve by using my 1 GB flash drive in place of non-functioning CD, which magically started to work again after I finished. I do not know if you would be able to do similar, which was to copy my entire CD to the flash drive and go that way.

speedstep · Answer

USB booting is not an option on the GX240.
Booting from CD is.
2000/xp has a press any key to boot screen when its set properly to boot cd.

Press space bar or enter every 5 seconds until it boots if you dont see any screen.

Its also possible that your CDRW copy of the cd is not the bootable version.

In that case you must download INSTALL diskette images and do it that way.

Storage, Drives & Media

Optiplex GX240 wont boot from CD

Was this post helpful?