I am trying to help a friend access his CD before the HD in Windows 7 home premium.
If I tab down to the CD and press enter as directed and hit save and exit,
the boot order is not changed. What do I have to do to accomplish this?
I am able to do this in Windows 7 Pro 64-bit with no problem.
Thanks for any direction of how to fix this.
Not knowing what the friend's PC is we can only guess or offer general suggestions.
First thing, most BIOS' have an option to select the boot device by an F key at boot up. On many, that is F12. On others it may be F8 or F2. That will give you the menu with the various boot devices (e.g. CD drive or hard drive). You select the drive there to boot from.
Thank you very much for replying Fireberd.
Sorry for the omission. The computer of my friend is a Dell.
I can get in the bios. That is not the problem.
The boot sequence is as follows:
A. Hard Drive 1
Cd drive. 2
What I need to do is reverse them as follows:
B. CD drive 1
Hard Drive 2
This does not work for me. If I power down the puter and start up again
and go back into the BIOS the boot sequence shows as (A).
As stated above, I scroll down to the CD drive and Press Enter then save and
exit from the bios.
This puter is running Windows 7 32-bit home premium.
I have no problem getting to the boot menu.
After I get there previous messages tell the sad story.
If you have a bootable disc in the drive, and select that drive it doesn't boot?
You mention "CD" drive. If it IS a CD drive and you have a bootable DVD then that could be the reason.
What model Dell? for example Dimension 5150, Inspiron 660, XPS8500, etc.
You don't have to set the boot order in the BIOS, just select the device (e.g. CD drive) from the F12 menu. I worked the Dell forum for over 10 years and that is how it works.
It is a Dell Inspiron. don't know the model #.
Here is what I need to do.
Back up the HD with a program called Clonezilla-live.
This requires me to shut down the puter and put the Clonezill-live.iso CD
in the CD drive. Boot up and it should read the CD in the CD drive.
This is not happening because the Boot order is HD/cd not cd/HD.
You should be able to select the CD drive, from the list in F12 and boot from it, regardless of the boot order. That is the way it is designed to work, in ALL Dell's. F12, if the hard drive has not been modified and the hardware diagnostics deleted will also allow accessing the hardware diagnostics on the hard drive. F8 at power on will allow accessing the Dell "PC Restore" (recovery) partition, again if it has not been deleted and the MBR not changed.
If you cannot access the optical drive (CD) or it won't boot from it, that suggests either a BIOS problem or a hardware problem with the CD drive. You can try resetting the CMOS memory (BIOS) by (with the PC Powered Off) removing the CR2032 battery on the motherboard for at least 10 minutes.
And another possibility, the CD you want to boot from is either corrupt or not bootable.
F12 changes the boot order temporaarily (only for that one run). For a permanent change you have to go into the BIOS with F2 and then to the boot tab. From there read the instructiosn on the right side ot the screen.
He, apparently, can't get it to boot from the Disc he has from F12, and is unable to change the BIOS so the CD drive is the first boot device.
I suspect he has a corrupt disc or one that is not bootable.
Jack
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