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

[Jim Broughton]

CD drives fail all the time. Pull a CD drive from some other computer
and see if it works. Kind of irks me that they fail so much. Been through
at least 6 in the last 10 years. (includes CDRW drives and DVD drives as 
well).

Jim



Peter Bart wrote:
> 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?
>