Dell D800 Won't boot from CDR or USB

[Texun]

My boss was given an old Dell Lat. D800 when the company was upgrading his PC. They removed the HD and told him he could have the laptop. So........ he gets a new XP Pro disc and a new WD 120g HD but it won't boot from the CD.

We had another D800 that was headed for the recycle bin and I pulled the CDR drive and tried that. Still no boot. I tried my Vista and W7 discs to see if maybe his XP disc was bad. Nope. It returns the same message no matter what BIOS settings I use: "No bootable device found"

Any ideas?

So that's 2 CD drives and a total of 3 new MS OS's plus one bootable USB drive that I've tried and it won't boot. The drives grunt like they are loading but then they stop and the "No bootable device" message appears. I set the BIOS to boot only from the CD and then tried USB and neither worked. I'm wondering if maybe the company has some lock on it to prevent the machine from booting from a disc regardless of the BIOS setting. No help from IT. It's all we can do to get them to set up a printer.

There are boot from network options in the BIOS. What would I need to try that? I've got a small home network and a spare desktop I could copy the OS to.

 

[Gunbuster]

try f12 at the bios splash and select the cd to boot. You can also try downloading the dell diags cd from support.dell.com and running that to check for problems.

 

[darkewaffle]

I'd bet it's going to need a BIOS update in order to be capable of booting from USB, also check the BIOS for a "fast boot" option and I'd try booting after disabling it; it likes to bypass a fair bit of startup functionality which could be contributing to the problem.

 

[Gunbuster]

If you have USB devices with card readers plugged in (printers) that can also mess it up.

 

[Texun]

Nothing else plugged in. It's got a new and very blank HD. I tried the F12 option and just as in the BIOS the option to boot to a CD Drive is there but all the drive will do is grunt for a few seconds and stop. As mentioned above I've tried another drive from an identical laptop and it does the same thing. I would like to flash the BIOS but I need to find a way to get it to see a bootable drive. I'll try disabling fastboot and see if that helps.

Thanks!

 

[Texun]

I tried a Hiren's Boot CD and it boots perfectly from the CD drive but not with any MS related OS. I still haven't found a way to boot and load Windows.