Acer travelmate 290 laptop booting problem

[yonjun]

Hi,

I've purchased a used acer travelmate 290 laptop with DVD burner.
The DVD burner only recognized DVD media for some reason. So I formated HD and tried to boot from windows xp burned in DVD. It doesn't boot.

in the BIOS there are only 4 options for boot.
HD
CD
Floppy (this model doesn't have FDD. I presume USB FDD can work but I don't have one)
PXE LAN boot.

If it has USB boot then I can use external CDROM that i have but no such option.

right now lappy can't be boot in anyways I tried.

Any suggestions?

thanks

YJ

 

[montag451]

How many cd's did you try in the dvdplayer?

What is the error you get when you try to boot from cd?

 

[yonjun]

I've tried all sorts of CD's. It came with windows xp preloaded so I figured out it can't read any CD's but DVD's.
When I boot it with CD, it doesn't even recognize it. goes to next booting sequence.
when I boot with DVD, it is recognized but stops right after.

 

[montag451]

I'm sorry - but i must ask -
Are you sure that the cd's you are trying to boot from are bootable.....

Original XP/2K/98 disks are all bootable, I think.

Also, what does the CD/DVD drive show up as in the BIOS

 

[yonjun]

it's all bootable CDs

DVD drive is matshitadvd-ram uj-811

 

[montag451]

After a quick search, it seems there are many ppl with problems concerning this drive.

Could try:
http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmw...y=14&manufactor=18

 

[yonjun]

thanks.

I got a friend who has usb FDD. I'll borrow it and try to boot from FDD.
Unless I can boot one way or another, I can't even upgrade firmware of the DVD drive.

 

[montag451]

I'm not sure if USB floppy will work.

hope it does though.
Good luck

 

[yonjun]

i'll give it a shot.

the thing is in the bios there's an option to boot from floppy. but no floppy drive in the laptop. Doesn't it mean FDD from USB will boot?

 

[montag451]

I think it means that it would be happy to accept the manufacturers native hdd, or maybe even a parallel floppy drive.

I could be wrong -

 

[yonjun]

good news.
USB FDD booted. it was win98se booting disk though.
I'll download xp booting disk (set of 6) and try it.

another thing. can dos booting recognize external usb CDrom device?