installed SATA DVD, now can not boot from IDE DVD

[mgh]

Hi All,

I just installed an SATA DVD drive in my older Dell. I had to pull one of the IDE DVD drives out. Have been in to the BIOS and changed what setting were available.

SATA primary drive...............off.
SATA secondary drive...........CD-ROM device.

Primary master drive.............hard drive
Primary slave drive...............hard drive

Secondary master drive.........CD-ROM device
Secondary slave device.........off

Now I am unable to boot from the IDE (secondary master drive) DVD drive.

I have the BIOS set up to boot to CD-ROM first, and have tried using "boot sequence" on start up to select CD-ROM, but nothing works.

Any ideas what I have done wrong?

Thanks for any help.

 

[jnjkele]

In many BIOS's, in addition to the basic boot sequence, there is usually an additional setting that allows you set boot priority among the devices attached. i.e. with two DVD drives attached, you should, in theory, have a setting that allows you to tell the PC which DVD drive to boot from. I have two SATA hard drives and no IDE hard drives, and I had to tell the PC not only in what order to boot (CD, HDD, etc), but also which device has boot priority. I have no idea if your BIOS has such a setting, but I do remember that in my BIOS those settings aren't necessarily grouped with the boot sequence settings and it's something you haven't mentioned doing.

For what it's worth

-J