"mike" wrote in message
...
Flip Wilson wrote:
VanguardLH wrote in :

Well, I've gone as far as I can on a *generic* host since you never
have identified your make and model. Could be you have SATA hard
disks and IDE optical drives and somehow SATA devices get booted
first, or you SATA optical drives and IDE hard disks and the BIOS
defaults to using IDE devices first.

My motherboard is an XFX nForce 610I GEFORCE 7050 SOCKET775 DD

IF you installed the OS from the DVD.
AND you didn't change ANYTHING,
I can't see any way windows could have affected the system unless
it reflashed your BIOS. I don't think it did that.

I'm too lazy to reread the thread, so some of this may be redundant...
Did you unplug the hard drive and see if it would boot from DVD?
Did you swap the DVD to the primary port?

I have seen situations where the system would skip the DVD
and boot directly from the HD. But if I removed the HD, it would
boot from the DVD. I'm just guessing that my DVD drive was marginal.
With no other available boot options, it may try more times before
giving up.

There's a thing called PLOP boot manager.
I've used it on older systems where the bios didn't let me boot
the way I wanted. I booted PLOP from a floppy
and used it to select the boot device.

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html

That sounds like a terrific utility and a winner if it works.
Earlier in the thread I'd mentioned to the OP to take a look at the support
site for his mb and see if there happens to be a newer bios for his mb, and
if so to see what it fixes. He recently posted the name and number of his mb
and I went to XFX (maker of his mb) but found one had to register their
product before any downloads would be available. That stopped my search as I
had no XFX motherboard serial number to register.
About ten years ago I had an Abit KT7 that at some point in its life
wouldn't allow booting from the CD, even when I chose the CD as the first
device. It had a pretty early bios in the KT7 series and when I flashed it
to the newest I was suddenly re-able to boot from the CD. It was memorable
to me at least, and I thought perhaps the same possiblity could be true of
the OP's mb, should there be a new bios available.
--
Jan Alter