Greetings,
I have an old PIII/550 that my kids use. It's overdue for a cleanup due to all their junk. I'm not having boot difficulties, just really need to speed things up with a fresh install of XP Pro.
It's been a long time, however, and I guess I didn't take good notes last time around as for the life of me I cannot get it to boot from CD.
- BIOS boot sequence: CD, C, A (also tried SCSI, C, A -- more on that later)
- Sony CD-R on primary IDE.
- Plextor CD-RW on an Adaptec SCSI controller.
- I have 2 HDDs on a Promise controller.
- Pulled the jammed floppy drive out a while ago so can't go the boot-from-A route.
No matter what I do I cannot seem to get the "Press any key to boot from CD..." message. It seeks the CD-R briefly upon start up but continues right on through to boot from C.
Tried to boot from the SCSI Plextor -- I get the "Bootable CD detected" message, but still it boots to XP on the HDD. I'm not fully up to speed on the SCSI BIOS utility so I could be missing something there, but at least it acknowledged the bootable disk and loaded the SCSI BIOS. From there, however, it went right on to XP on the HDD.
I've got SP2 installed so when I try to run setup from within XP it tells me my current install is newer and doesn't let me continue.
Any thoughts? The box is so old and really kind of limps along on XP Pro that I can't see investing a single dime, nor much more time, into this. But I already deactivated their iTunes, burned a good back-up and am all ready to roll on a fresh install so I thought I'd check with some experts before tossing it.
Thanks for any tips,
~Jacy