[mdlug] Dell Optiplex GX520 Won't Boot From CD

[Peter Bart]

Hi Everyone,
	Ok, so it's been my week to dumpster dive. I rescued the Dell from
another dumpster, thinking I might be able to resurrect it as a Linux
box for my coworker whose XP machine is on it's last legs. I'm able to
get into the BIOS look around and change things. I see the hard drive,
cd/dvd drive, and floppy are all recognized and enabled in the boot
order and elsewhere in the BIOS. It tries to boot XP but stops at a blue
screen very shortly after the Windows splash. Booting from CD yields
nothing, not even a hum from the drive although the idiot light comes
on. I can boot from the floppy; go figure; using an old DSL boot floppy
I have. This just gets me into a very limited shell, I would need to
bone up on that. I unplugged the computer, opened it up and pulled and
reseated the drive connectors. I pulled and reset; after several
minutes; the CMOS battery. I pulled on the drive power connectors, but
when they didn't easily come out settled for firmly seating them. Still
no luck. I'm going to try an external CD drive, if I can find one.
	My questions are: Does anyone know that this is a known issue that I
just haven't found out about? Might it be worth the time to work on it a
bit more?
-- 
Best Regards,

Peter The Plumber