No longer boot from CD ROM

  • Thread starter Thread starter churin
  • Start date Start date
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churin

I tried various bootable CD/DVDs which used to work on this optical
drive but they are no longer able to boot from them.

The problem symptom is that 1) CD ROM is completely ignored and OS boots
from a HDD, 2) booting process begins but it stalls. There is one kind
of bootable CD which still boots which is DOS CD. I replaced the optical
drive with a new one, but the problem symptom is the same.

Could it be that something happened to the motherboard? Any suggestion
is appreciated.
 
Hi,

Does it boot from a CD and not a DVD? This could indicate a problem with the
lens - have you tried a drive cleaner disk yet?

Also, try removing all other devices from the list of bootable drives in the
system BIOS to force loading the optical drive. If it still balks, then you
have a problem with the drive itself.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
Thanks for your response.
No, it does not from both. It begins to boot from the optical device but
it stalls. I replaced the drive with the new one but the same
sysmptom repeated. I changed the contrller channel from the secondary to
the primary but no dice.
 
I still get "Press any key to boot from optical drive", and if a key is
pressed booting process begins. The problem is it stalls.
 
I found the cause of the problem: I recently added one 1GB RAM stick on
top of two 1GB sticks. The one added was removed then the problem gone.
I do not know why, because everything else looked normal.
 
It is single channel system. Subsequently, it was found that this module
alone causes the problem. Memory test utility(Memtest186) was run for
about 40 minutes and no error was reported. This memory module is a
brand-new. I may have difficulty convincing the vendor to issue RAM for
this memory.
 
If it's any consolation, I have had RAM that passed hours of both MemTest86
and DrMem, but caused failures in my computer. It was proved by replacing
sticks one at a time, since I really believed circumstantially that I had
bad memory (computer memory!).
 
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