Booting And Installing From DVD Drive

"Searcher7" wrote in message
...
I have an HP Pavilion 7955 that didn't have a hard drive, so I put in
a 164G Serial-ATA Hitachi Deskstar(HDT722516DLA380). There is a light
blue connector that has a small PCB plugged into it that allows the
use of a SATA drive with the motherboard. And the drive is the only
one on it's cable.

I want to try to install XP from a DVD. But the screen that shows the
boot order is as follows:

Boot Device Priority
--------------------
CD-ROM Drive
+Removable Drives
+Hard Drive
Network Boot

Though the DVD drive is found by the BIOS, it doesn't show at all in
that Boot Priority screen.

Is there a way to get the DVD-ROM drive into this list?

The CD-ROM and DVD-Rom are on a single cable with it terminating at
the CD-ROM.

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

There may actually not be a listing for the letters "DVD" but an earlier
usage of CD-ROM in the bios. To insure that you're seeing the DVD-ROM
temporarily disconnect the CD-ROM from the cable and see if the DVD-ROM
still shows up. You can always add the CD-ROM drive back in after
installation.If it does as a CD-ROM then you've done the job right. Also,
make sure these drives are jumpered appropriately as master and slave if
they are on the same cable. Some DVD and CD-ROM drives are particular to
having themselves set as 'master' and don't like being a slave. No pun
intended.

If you get this far and can boot to XP then you may also be thoughtful
that XP may need you to use a SATA driver to actually see your SATA drive,
that would be copied from a floppy disk, which would depend on the way the
motherboard translates SATA drves as IDE drives for the OS. If the drive
gets seen by XP for installation none of that would be necessary.

Jan Alter