BIOS won't boot from DVD

**samo21** · 08-25-2005, 12:23 AM

So, I downloaded Knoppix 4.0 and burnt the ISO to a dvd-r. I restarted my system and noticed that it didn't look for the dvd rom drive like it does the cd rom, so I went into my BIOS to try and set it to do so. The only problem is that in my BIOS it only lets me choose CD Rom Drive, Hard Disk, or Floppy drive to boot from. I can reagrrange their order or uncheck them but it won't let me add my Dvd Rom to the list. I've searched around the Forums and couldn't figure out how to do this, so any help would be appreciated.

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-25-2005, 12:36 AM

While BIOSs tend to only mention CD, usually they will boot from either CD or DVD. Some BIOSs seem to only boot from the first (master) optical drive though and don't check the other drives. Is you DVD the slave? If so you might want to make it the master and the CD the slave.

If all else fails you can look at Smart Boot Manager or XOSL. With Smart Boot Manager you can make a floppy that will let you boot from any of the optical drives. Even better, you can install it right to your hard disk master boot record (MBR) and it will come up each time you boot, giving you the option to boot windows and/or any other OS on the hard disk or boot from any optical drive or floppy. XOSL is even nicer, more powerful and has a much cleaner looking user interface. It uses the SBM code internally to do the optical drive boot. It is slightly more complex to set up and does need a little hard disk space (I suggest giving XOSL it's own tiny partition, just a few meg in size), but I use both XOSL and SBM and generally I like XOSL a lot more.

**samo21** · 08-26-2005, 12:23 AM

Well, my BIOS now recognized my DVD rom drive but it won't boot from it. As far as I can tell it's not the media's fault because it woudln't boot my knoppix 3.8 disc, which did boot in my CDR drive. I'd really like to not have to set my DVDR as the master. So, with the Smart Boot Manager, I put it onto a diskett with both the main exe and it's support file, but when I tell my computer to boot from floppy it doesn't work. Is there something I'm missing? Thanks for the help.

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-26-2005, 01:58 AM

Originally Posted by samo21

...I put it onto a diskett with both the main exe and it's support file, but when I tell my computer to boot from floppy it doesn't work. Is there something I'm missing?

Yup, you don't put the 2 files onto the DVD, you run the exe (from hard disk and from a DOS prompt) and it creates a bootable floppy (or installs to the hard disk MBR, depending on the options you give it).