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I wanted to connect my external DVD drive to my old laptop and boot from a CD. But my computer doesn't show the DVD drive in the boot menu.

After trying to change BIOS settings and finally restored them to defaults, it still does not work.

I can't even hear the DVD drive working until Windows XP or Ubuntu are loaded. After the OS loaded, it works like nothing is wrong. And the mysterious thing is, that this drive has worked on this laptop before. Never a problem.

New to that is maybe, that I borrowed some friend the laptop but she only used Windows XP to write some stuff, but I can't think of what she have done.

The DVD drive works well on other computers to boot from. Other USB drives work well on the laptop.

How can I fix this problem?

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  • So this DVD Drive has been used to boot this machine in the past? If not, you may be out of luck. Booting from USB, can be finicky. You say the drive works after the OS is loaded? But can't boot from the drive? Have you tried and alternative disc to boot from? I have seen a good Drive won't boot certain boot-able discs.
    – TheSavo
    Feb 15, 2012 at 19:04
  • This is my old laptop, i have always installed all OS on that machine over exactly this external dvd-drive and now it won't work. Of course, i tried another cd, which ran before, but my computer doesn't show me the drive to pick in boot menu, no matter what cd is inside. I tried other computers and every cd runs fine... After OS runs i can acces the drive but not at boot time.
    – sewo
    Feb 15, 2012 at 20:44

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Double check the boot sequence settings in your BIOS setup. "CDROM" and "USB-CDROM" are often separate options, and plain "CDROM" will only use PATA and SATA. (applies to all optical disk drives)

I have the same settings for floppy disks, "FLOPPY" and "USB-FLOPPY". My external floppy disk drive is not bootable unless I tell the BIOS (or F12 boot menu) to use "USB-FLOPPY".

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