Can't boot from dvd?

[Reapsy01]

Hi,

I burnt a bootable dvd, which works fine on my computer, but when I try it on my friends pc it doesn't work, after a while of trying it says insert bootable disk or select valid boot drive type message.

His dvd-rw drive is an LG and mine is a NEC but shouldn't it work on any drive?

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I assume you set his DVD-RW drive to be the first boot device? Have you tried using a bootable CD to see if it boots with that?

 

[Reapsy01]

yeah a bootable cd i've got works fine.

 

[Wentelteefje]

Did you burn it slow enough? I recall reading that it matters...

 

[Reapsy01]

umm no I think I burnt it at fastest in alcohol 120% so probably 16x but hey thats kind of the reason why I bought a 16 x burner and 16x discs.

 

[V00D00]

Originally posted by: Wentelteefje
Did you burn it slow enough? I recall reading that it matters...

No, that doesn't matter, to a certain extent. Those stupid people who burn everything at 1x are wrong about there being fewer errors at 1x than 4x. But there are usually fewer erors when you burn at 4x rather than 1x. 8x will probably give you fewer errors than at 16x.

Did you check the write curve in alcohol? Was it a good clean line? This indicates there are fewer errors, but with 16x I would imagine there will be quite a bit of errors regardless.

Try it at 8x, that might produce fewer errors allowing the other drive to recognize it better.

Some drives probably just can't support booting from a dvd. It doesn't sound too out of the ballpark IMO.

 

[AlucardX]

if he has 2 cd/dvd drives in his system and the dvd drive is the slave, then it won't boot off of it. i'm pretty sure when you specify boot device for 'cdrom' it's only going to try to boot off the master drive if you had 2 drives on the same cable. if you had 1 drive on each channel, than it would only boot from the drive on the first channel (ide 0).

 

[corkyg]

Did you close/finish the DVD burn? If you "packet wrote it" then it will work on your computer but no one elses.

 

[Reapsy01]

He only has 1 dvd device plugged in atm because of the position of the IDE connections on the Asrock board and his huge case the cable won't reach the other drive. So it is on the secondary IDE channel as a master.

I'm not really sure what I did to burn it just Alcohol's image writing wizard then selected the image then burn. The default options I used were write method DVD DAO, write speed maximum I don't see any option for closing/finishing the write so I guess it assumes you want to do that maybe?

 

[Reapsy01]

Ah it turns out the dvd-rw drive won't read any dvd's only cd's. This is not good. It is brand new so I guess I'll need to send it back. It seems like a strange fault though I mean if it was faulty I'd expect it to not work at all rather than not work for dvd's.

Has anyone seen this kind of fault before? I'm trying to think if there's anything I cvould have done wrong to cause this while I was installing it but can't think of anything.

Is there any troubleshooting kind of stuff I can do? I've tried a couple of discs I've burnt and a game I bought on dvd none of which work.

Cheers.