If you can`t get to the boot screen, then the boot order in the bios has to be...
1) DVD Drive
2) Hard Drive.
If you want to use a boot screen, it should show you which key to push when you first turn on the pc, usually at the bottom.
Can you boot any other disk in this PC like Free Partition Wizard ?
Can you boot the disk you burned in any other PC?
Try flash stick since these disk should all autostart with a blank HDD.
If Flash stick won't boot then disable the DVD drive in BIOS to eliminate it as suspect.
I loaded the ISO onto a freshly formatted flash drive at work today. Came home, turned on computer, tapped F2 for BIOS, enabled external device boot, put external device first in boot order, turned off computer, plugged in USB flash drive, turned on computer and... VOILA!! Black screen with "windows is loading files" then went straight to windows install screen asking for language preferences.
I still don't know why it wouldn't work with the disk, but at least it's working now.
Thank you for all the suggestions and support!
Two thoughts on why the first attempts failed
1) The dreaded user error :)
I've seen people simply burn the ISO to a disc without making it bootable - an easy thing to do by mistake. I don't know if that happened in your case or not.
2) The dreaded bad media.
In some cases the download was incomplete or corrupted in transmission.
In other cases the DVD wasn't written correctly or the flash was bad (this was a hard nut to crack)
BIOS will look for something to bootstrap - it shouldn't matter what the boot order is in your case, there wasn't anything on the HD, so it looks at the Optical drive and Flash ports in the boot order specified if external device booting is allowed. When it finds a device with bootstrap code, BIOS hands over the process to whatever code is on the device.
Until I read about your success, I wondered if the HD was seated correctly. My HP Vista machine won't do anything unless there is a HD connected.
Glad you're on your way to a successful install now.
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