Problems Booting the DVD

[Harry Kuhman]

but it doesn't give me the option to make it master, only to turn it on or off

What is it? I've never seen an IDE DVD drive that could not be made a master, and have never seen an option to "turn it on or off". What are you looking at?

[Chthonic Miasma]

looking through my drives in my BIOS, it identifies my CD-ROM as and IDE Master, and my DVD-ROM as slave, the only option i can change on either of them is to enable or disable use of them

[Harry Kuhman]

You don't make a drive master or slave in the BIOS, you do it with jumpers on the back of the drive. If you do make the DVD drive the master you will have to make the current master drive on the same cable a slave, you can't have 2 masters on one IDE bus.

You obviously have no experience with this. It's easy enough to do, but I'm not advising you to do it. I have no idea of your capability.

[Chthonic Miasma]

i know the tabs on the back that choose between master and slave, but it sounded like he was linking it to the BIOS. Just because i'm a programmer and built my own computer doesn't mean i know everything. my question then is this, after analyzing a friends computer, 4.0 will boot on his slave dvd-rom, what other problems could be the cause?

[Harry Kuhman]

If you read through these forums (forgive me for such a foolish suggestion) you'll find hundreds of strange things that might keep a hunk of media from booting. Your theory that your system might only be willing to boot from the master device seemed as good as any to me. But since you've now convinced yourself that can not be it because of something a completely different system does, why not try an experiment that would be even less work than moving the two little jumpers: try booting a Knoppix CD in the DVD drive. If it boots then it seems that the BIOS is able to boot from a slave device and so the master/slave thing likely (but not certainly) isn't the issue. If your BIOS will not boot a CD either from the slave device then that's very likely the issue. You did say previously:

3.7-3.9 all boot on this computer fine, and 3.8.2 only had a hardware issue, but the dvd doesnt even give a try

but you didn't tell us which drive you were booting the CD from. So you might have already done this but we have no way of knowing since you didn't say which drive you used to boot the CD. Your "but the dvd doesnt even give a try" statement sure seems to indicate that the BIOS isn't even spinning up the slave drive.

[cookingout]

Just a suggestion, I have a computer at work that the DVD drive is configured as Master and the CD burner is Slave. Since the computer is shared and not mine I decided not to change anything. However, when I turn my Primary/Master (DVD) drive off in the BIOS the PC will boot from the Secondary/Slave (CD Burner) drive. After my Knoppix CD boots, Knoppix sees both CD and DVD drive (since it does not take the BIOS setting as serious as Windows does). This allows me to use whichever drive I wish using the BIOS setting like a switch. The only problem I have is when I forget to turn both drives back on in the BIOS, the poor Windows users whine because they have one drive that does not get detected.

[justin_c]

search through these forums should be the first thing you should of done (im not flaming you or anything just a suggestion that should be done)

try sbm smart boot manager or a boot floppy which supports optical devices

tell me the specs of your pc, specifically your motherboard (mobo)
and if you get a glimpse, tell me the specific bios version ill check on google for you

best regards,

jc

[Chthonic Miasma]

thanx to everyone for the assistance, cookingouts experience was very helpful, as soon as i disabled my standard CD-ROM the boot went seamlessly. i've now switched the master and slave drives and am having no further problems. thanx to JC, and the unneeded but still respected sarcasm from Harry