Grub has disabled my CD boot

[James Wilkinson]

Michael A. Peters wrote:
> Your bios either isn't set to boot from the CD, or your CD is not
> bootable / misburned.
> 
> grub lives on the boot sector of a hard drive. It does not touch or care
> about your bios. Your bios will search for something to boot in the
> order it is configured to.
> 
> If the CD is configured to boot first but the bios doesn't see it as
> bootable because of a bad burn, it will go to the next device - which
> likely is the MBR that grub is loaded on.
> 
> Check your bios boot order, and if the CD/DVD is configured to boot
> first - then you probably have a mis-burned DVD.

It's also possible that the Original Poster's CD drive is picky about
CD-RWs or CD-Rs.

On my old computer, it took a few seconds for my CD drive to work out
that yes, it did have a CD inside, spin it up, and read the boot sector.
By this time, the BIOS had decided that the CD drive obviously *didn't*
have anything bootable inside, and gone on to the next boot device.

My workaround was to insert the CD at the "right point" of the BIOS
screen, timing it so that the disc was still spun up when the BIOS tried
booting from it. That meant the drive could find the boot sector faster,
and the BIOS would use it.

It wouldn't do this with pressed CDs -- it could spin those up fast
enough by itself.

Hope this helps,

James.
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