espendale

Hello.

I have a problem with my HP Compaq 8510w, running Vista. The computer is working smoothly, and so far Vista seems ok. The only thing that sucks is the partitioning which is pre-defined by HP, giving me -- in effect -- one drive with 100gb, one with 1,5gb, and one HP recovery drive occupying 8gbs.

This HP drive is bootable, so that I can always return to the computers original condition when having problems. The drawback is, of course, all the HP software and stuff you get on your computer, just occupying space and time.

I want to clean the whole computer, repartitionate the way I like it (one system drive c:, and one personal drive d:), and I have a legal Vista-ISO (and XP, for that matter) burned to a DVD.

However, I am not able to boot from the DVDs. I have tested it on other computers, and it works fine. Its almost like I'm lacking some drivers or something in the BIOS, because the option "press a key to boot from DVD" does not appear.

My computer knowledge is somewhere over average - I think - and I have tweaked a little in BIOS to get it to boot. Still, I am out of luck.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Espen Dale, Norway.

JohnthePilot

Hi and welcome to TSF.
Would you please recheck your BIOS to make sure that the CD drive is indeed the first boot device?

dai

in the bios see if you have the option to disable the hp logo,i found on my lenovo once this was disabled the bios setting appeared

espendale

My CD drive is my first device, yes. I do not see any possibility to remove the logo either...

Now I am having a problem with the boot in general, my SATA is f***ed, and Windows will not boot regardless of the SATA native mode being enabled or not. I think this happened because of me trying to install a driver update for my SATA, as recommended to me by some guy at HP support.

Status right now: no possibility to boot windows, and no possibility to reinstall from DVD:-(

dai

see if you can find how to reset the cmos and reset it the method varies from one brand to another

espendale

Hmm, what is cmos? By reseting it, what do I do?

I have an option called "disk sanitizer", which cleans the whole hard drive. Is it possible that I might be able to boot from DVD after deleting everything?

dai

clearing the cmos resets the bios
disk sanitizer clears the drive like dban and killdisk
the picking up of the dvd comes in before the h/d is accessed

JohnthePilot

Have a look in your motherboard manual and see if you can find out how to reset your CMOS in there. If not, open the back of your machine and look for the CMOS battery. It's shiny, circular and about 1" across. It's held in by a clip. First make sure you remove any static from yourself by touching something like a radiator, then remove the battery for about twenty minutes then put it back and reboot.

espendale

Thank you for all your response.

It turned out that the solution lay i the BIOS.

First, I had to disable the "Sata native mode", for the machine to boot from dvd.

Secondly, I had to -- not enable the DVD drive boot -- but disable all the other options. That gave the bios time to understand that a DVD acually was inserted.

Anyway, I now run my computer perfectly, with perfect partitioning.

One thing, though. I cannot reenable my sata native mode, as it makes the computer shut down during boot (blue screen). Is this a problem? Should I spend time on solving this issue?

dai

not if it is running ok thanks for posting back what fixed it