Normally you're supposed to change the boot sequence through your computer's BIOS so it looks for the operating system first from your CD-ROM drive.
Have you tested your bootable CD on another computer to ensure it is actually bootable?
If you're using a Windows 98 boot disk, you have to ensure the default CD-ROM drivers are installed so you can access your CD-ROM drive. I think the driver name is MSCDEX.EXE (i.e. Microsoft CD extensions).
So there should be an entry in the config.sys or the autoexec.bat referencing this file. If you need the syntax, just google "MSCDEX".
They have a lot of links to sites which have literally dozens of OEM and modified boot disk images which can be extracted to a floppy..everything from old DOS boot disks to WINXP. worked for me. When something weird happened to my laptop and wouldn't boot from the CDROM, I simply downloaded the appropriate boot disk from that site, slipped it into my USB floppy drive, inserted the OS CDROM into it's drive, rebooted and selected the "one time boot" option when it restarted, selected the floppy drive as the boot device,and it worked perfectly. You should also run Dell Diagnostics to verify that your CDROM drive is functioning properly before you do this as well. Hope this helps :)
TimW_of_NY
92 Posts
0
May 25th, 2005 20:00
Have you tested your bootable CD on another computer to ensure it is actually bootable?
If you're using a Windows 98 boot disk, you have to ensure the default CD-ROM drivers are installed so you can access your CD-ROM drive. I think the driver name is MSCDEX.EXE (i.e. Microsoft CD extensions).
So there should be an entry in the config.sys or the autoexec.bat referencing this file. If you need the syntax, just google "MSCDEX".
Tim
bda68
5 Posts
0
May 26th, 2005 13:00
You may want to try this URL: http://www.bootdisk.com
They have a lot of links to sites which have literally dozens of OEM and modified boot disk images which can be extracted to a floppy..everything from old DOS boot disks to WINXP. worked for me. When something weird happened to my laptop and wouldn't boot from the CDROM, I simply downloaded the appropriate boot disk from that site, slipped it into my USB floppy drive, inserted the OS CDROM into it's drive, rebooted and selected the "one time boot" option when it restarted, selected the floppy drive as the boot device,and it worked perfectly. You should also run Dell Diagnostics to verify that your CDROM drive is functioning properly before you do this as well. Hope this helps :)
Message Edited by bda68 on 05-26-2005 11:25 AM