How do I boot from the optical drive?

[globiumz]

Struggling

 

[CalvinHobbes]

You can set the boot order in the BIOS to DVD first or you can press whatever key brings up the boot menu during bootup if your PC supports that.

 

[Peter]

You can type in BIOS? Now that's new

Seriously, what you do in BIOS is include your optical drive in the list of devices to attempt boot from - preferrably before the HDD.

Then BIOS will detect your OS installation disk in the drive, and boot to that. If the HDD isn't empty, you'll be prompted to "hit any key to boot from CD/DVD", which you obviously do.

 

[Nothinman]

You can type in BIOS? Now that's new

Not really, Digital/Compaq SRM for their Alphas was a CLI firmware. They did add the abomination that was AlphaBIOS later on to support NT which was menu driven but man did it suck. The EFI firmware that we had with our IA64 machines at my last job was CLI as well until elilo started up IIRC.