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Unable to boot from CD

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I have a Dell Latitude C610 which refuses to boot from CD. I have set the BIOS to boot from CD first, but it insists on booting from hard disk. I have changed the CD drive, but to no avail. When I put a different hard disk in the machine it happily boots from CD. When I try my hard disk in a different machine it again will not boot from CD.

Can anyone help please?

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What can I say – it is a Dell, what else can you expect.

Ok, Ok. Dell (like many proprietry types) have a number of systems where some of the BIOS and boot info is stored on the HDD and you need a special Dell utility to make any changes to that info. making normal BIOS changes wont affect this special data.

It appears that the overiding Boot instruction is in this data on the HDD and you will need to contact Dell to get the utility to change this ‘recovery image’ information.

The only otherway that I have seen work is to place the drive in a ‘vanila’ PC and use fdisk to delete all partitions and create new partitions and reformat the drive and create a new MBR. This usually blows away the Dell image, but it means you can not tweak the system as much as you used to be able to with the Dell specific utilities.

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