Other ISOs wont boot.

Exactly what the title says. I have BT2 as the only OS on my laptop right now ( Sony Vios VGN-fs640W) and i decided that i wanted Windows on their as well for other purposes. Now when i put in the actual Windows XP Home edition cd in. It goes straight to lilo and loads bt2. Now i figure it's just because its a cd and the Sony will only read DVD ISOs. So i try Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn which is on a dvd. It still skips it. I have it set so i can boot frmo optical drive and it just does nothing. I can hear the dvd drive moving and reading it but Lilo just loads and then bt2 loads. Any ideas why? I had a couple rough installs with bt2 ( took about 4 for a good HDD install ) so maybe i could have damaged something? I googled for a couple hours and nothing. Any help would be nice. If worse comes to worse, i guess i will have to order the sony recovery disc.

Thank you.

-seven

A couple of things spring to mind

Firstly make sure that you have set the boot order correctly in the bios ie: make sure that it is set to boot from the cdrom drive before any other boot devices.

Secondly I don't understand why it will only read a dvd and not a cd, as all dvd drives will read a cd, unless the cd is damaged or the drive is faulty or possibly one or both of them need cleaning.

Thirdly I presume that the Windows XP home cd is full version and not just a recovery cd as most that are supplied with computers nowadays are just recovery cds.

As you say it happens with other install disks as well I would suspect it is either of the first two options and the most likely of any of them is the first.

Could it be the load time.. Try setting the time in Lilo higher.

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Originally Posted by balding_parrot

A couple of things spring to mind

Firstly make sure that you have set the boot order correctly in the bios ie: make sure that it is set to boot from the cdrom drive before any other boot devices.

Secondly I don't understand why it will only read a dvd and not a cd, as all dvd drives will read a cd, unless the cd is damaged or the drive is faulty or possibly one or both of them need cleaning.

Thirdly I presume that the Windows XP home cd is full version and not just a recovery cd as most that are supplied with computers nowadays are just recovery cds.

As you say it happens with other install disks as well I would suspect it is either of the first two options and the most likely of any of them is the first.

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thank you for your suggestions, but yes i did set the optical drive as first priority on boot. And i have no idea why it wont read my CDs on boot up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Paton

Could it be the load time.. Try setting the time in Lilo higher.

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How do i change the load time? I know delay is how long it takes lilo to wait before loading the first image.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by seven

How do i change the load time? I know delay is how long it takes lilo to wait before loading the first image.

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Edit the lilo.conf file. There is a line:

Code:

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timeout=50

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Where the number (50, or whatever it is) represents tenths of a second. Therefore, in this case, the timeout is 5 seconds.

Lilo shouldn't effect your booting from a cd at all. By the time you see the lilo screen, your box is already booting from the hard drive.

If you have the bios setup correctly to boot from the optical drive, and it won't boot from other installation media either, you might have a hardware problem. I'd try my boot media in another computer to verify it works. I'd then try running a drive cleaning disk in my dvd player. I would then make sure I had the bios setup correctly, again.
Does the drive work normally while bt is running?
Can you boot any cd?
How did you install bt? If you booted the livecd, will it still boot?

Does you laptop have a built in boot menu? I can hit del when my laptop boots and it will pop up a menu allowing me to choose a boot device. If yours has a "boot menu" keycode, try it.

A working dvd drive will boot from cdroms as well as dvds.

I don't know how installing any distro could "break" your dvd drive, no matter how big a pita it was. More than likely it's:
bad media
bad bios settings
hardware related

Good Luck

It worked fine before. I installed ubuntu but then realized i wanted to install backtrack 2 and windows ( i havent gotten around to installing windows yet so its just bt2 ) i messed up a couple times ( at one point i had a bunch of "9"s running across my screen ) and now..well here is the funny part. If i put in the livecd of bt2...it works. But if i put in the ubuntu cd or windows cd. It doesnt work.

You say your ubuntu disk worked before? It sounds to me like it's your drive. I'd buy a cleaning disk and see if it helps. I'd also try booting that windows disk in another computer.

If it turns out to be a bad optical drive, they are not that hard to change out. You can also buy an external, usb drive bay, put a cheap cdrom drive in it and install from there.

Good Luck