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

[Peter Bart]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 23:43 -0400, Jim Broughton wrote:
> 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?
> >   
> 
	And that's what it was. I've got it running a rescue disk taking a look
around. I'm planning on putting Xubuntu on it even though it has two
cores. It's supposed to be a Pentium D 800mhz, which the BIOS confirms.
-- 
Best Regards,

Peter The Plumber