If a Compaq Presario doesn’t show the option to boot from CD or it does but still cannot boot you will need to address several problems.
The most obvious thing to check is whether the CD you are trying to boot from is free of errors. From time to time it happens that after you burn the CD it is not recognized by the OS or CD-ROM. Just try the CD on another PC, if it works then your machine has the problem.
After you know that there is nothing wrong with the CD it would also be good to know whether your CD-ROM isn’t too old for reading the new format boot CDs, or perhaps the disk was written with a speed that is not supported by your CD-ROM.
If you have eliminated all of the above issues, what you can try next is to see if the PC is actually configured to boot from a CD. You can do this by accessing BIOS (press “F1” several times at boot). Navigate in BIOS to the advanced BIOS features and then to the section when you can adjust the boot order. Select the CD/DVD-ROM for first boot device, the HDD for second. Press “F10” to save settings and then “Enter” to reboot. Insert your bootable CD and see what happens. Normally you should get a message that prompts you to press a key in order to boot from CD. If it does not happen try to reboot and at the first screen press “F8” several times to bring up the boot menu. Here select boot from CD-ROM and it should be OK from there on. If not then it means that the optical drive is much slower than the hard disk and it hasn’t time to access the information on the CD, while the faster hard drive kicks into action. You could bypass this by disabling all boot devices in BIOS except the CD-ROM.
Now if you really can’t get your Presario to boot form the CD there still are options. Try making a bootable USB drive and set the PC to boot from that. For older PCs there is only one option really – if you have a floppy drive – boot from a floppy. For those of you who are not old enough to remember, to create a bootable floppy disk you need to download a Windows 98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com). Format the floppy with you have just downloaded and you have a w98boot disk. Now restart you Presario with the floppy inside. You will get a command prompt and you will have to actually know some commands for this to work. If you know the name of the .exe file that you wanted to run from the bootable CD just type the path of the application and press “enter.”
So if you have no choice to boot from CD in a Compaq Presario these are the options that you can try.
Tags: BIOS, Compaq Presario no choice to boot from CD, floppy, usb