Dell Inspiron won't Boot from CD-ROM

Hi, I need to boot my DELL Inspiron 12500(PP02L) with a Bootable CD. However, everytime I'm booting, it straight goes and boots WinXP. I tried F12 when booting and it doesn't do anything - WinXP boots up without giving me an option of any kind. I even tried F2 and it took me to the BIOS. I see Removable media and it has 'Hard Disk', 'CD-ROM', 'Intel…. 'Hard Disk' is selected, but when I move down to CD-ROM and press enter, nothing happens. With 'CD-ROM' selected, I press F10 to save and exit. The computer boots up, but it does not boot from the CD-ROM. It just loads WinXP again from the Hard Disk. Pls help.

Hi and welcome to the WTT forums

I see you have posted the same question here and are receiving assistance:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=339218

It is always difficult when you are trying to assist a friend with their own computer that is not in front of you and even more so when it is in a different country.

We do not wish to make any particular suggestions in view of the excellent advice you are receiving from Apollo 13 in the above linked thread.

1 However it might be wise to double check that the Ubuntu distribution your friend is using has definitely been burned as a bootable disc and he is not trying maybe another disc that just has the files copied?
2 Its vital that the BIOS is set to read the optical drive (CD/DVD) as boot priority one, with Hard drive 0 as boot priority two, otherwise the machine will boot straight into Windows via the hard drive.
3 Your friend should check the manual for entering the BIOS but on a lot of Dell machines tapping regularly once per second the F2 key immediately after switch on will take him into the BIOS when the Boot priority can be set. Its important that he saves the change(s) before exiting the BIOS and then restarts his machine with the bootable Ubuntu disc in the CD/DVD drive
Regards
paws

Hi there, As above, it's difficult to help with this issue without physically being there, however, my only suggestion is: From the sounds of it, you're in the right place but you're pressing enter on the CD/DVD drive instead of making it the priority. So what you need to do is move the CD/DVD to the top of the list. Your BIOS may be different than some other ones, i've seen quite a lot of different BIOS setups over the years and if yours just gives you a list of things to boot from, you need to use the direction keys on the keyboard to push up the CD/DVD drive to the top of the list, then save & exit changes. Hope this is of some help, 'Bob p.s Sorry for jumping in there Paws, just thought i'd drop a bit of info!

Always good to see you here Bob, and lets hope that between us we can solve the problems Regards paws

I'm having the same exact problem as you. I'm trying to change the boot sequence in my Dell Zino HD (Inspiron 400). How did you over come this??

Hi Dbbrecco

The instructions given by Bob and Paws above should be sufficient for your question… unless they are not.

In the event that you do need additional assistance…

Please open your own topic, so that our volunteers can gather information, and then hopefully diagnos and suggest a solution.

Best Regards

There's something new on the Dell Inspiron series.. I've seen one laptop with a Windows 8 restore server information screen (for recoveries/ftp), and an Inspiron 15 laptop today that wouldn't boot anything but the internal hard drive, Network boot, and secure attached drives. (Couldn't even figure it out in BIOS.). I've worked on many laptops since 1993, and never seen anything like this one… One possibility, using something like unetbootin, you can copy your CD to a USB thumb drive and possibly boot from that, or even use PXE (in a long-about way) to host it through the network.. Unfortunately, I don't see many other options on these new ones. I worry we can't remove the hard drive because of bios-internal passwords (non-changable, set from the factory).. similar to secure-chip laptops of the past… I've used UBCD4Win on many systems, these are the first 2 they won't work on at all.. kinda strange..