I have a Dell Inspiron N5010 that will only boot off the hard drive or a Windows 7 DVD. I am trying to run Hiren's Boot CD for diagnostics. I press F12 for boot menu and select CD/DVD drive but that is ignored unless it is a Windows 7 DVD. I modified the BIOS setting to put the hard drive at the very end. Still boots only the Windows 7 DVD if selected or the hard drive.
I booted into Windows and ran HxD and changed the 80 of the first partition of the partition table to 00 so that the system does not see the Windows 7 partition as bootable. System now boots straight to Windows 7 DVD but still ignores other bootable optical discs.
I have tried booting from Knoppix, Kasperski rescue CD, Hiren's Boot CD, Plop. I also converted the Hiren's boot CD and Kasperski rescue CD to bootable USB. All discs and USb flash drives booted fine from other system.
My conclusion is that somehow this Dell laptop is programmed to reject anything non-microsoft. Is this true, or am I still missing something?
UPDATE:
This makes things even weirder. I removed the hard drive from the laptop and attached to another system to change the 00 back to 80 so that it would boot again. Decide to see if the discs will boot without the hard drive. All of them did. Even the USB flash drives. The diagnostics are no use though since the hard drive is not present. Anyway, put in a blank 120GB laptop drive. All discs and flash drives booted with no problems. I then booted from the Windows 7 DVD and installed Windows 7. Now it is back to the beginning of this whole problem. All bootable media is ignored except for the Windows 7 DVD and the hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it.
I have no clue what could be causing this behavior.
I booted into Windows and ran HxD and changed the 80 of the first partition of the partition table to 00 so that the system does not see the Windows 7 partition as bootable. System now boots straight to Windows 7 DVD but still ignores other bootable optical discs.
I have tried booting from Knoppix, Kasperski rescue CD, Hiren's Boot CD, Plop. I also converted the Hiren's boot CD and Kasperski rescue CD to bootable USB. All discs and USb flash drives booted fine from other system.
My conclusion is that somehow this Dell laptop is programmed to reject anything non-microsoft. Is this true, or am I still missing something?
UPDATE:
This makes things even weirder. I removed the hard drive from the laptop and attached to another system to change the 00 back to 80 so that it would boot again. Decide to see if the discs will boot without the hard drive. All of them did. Even the USB flash drives. The diagnostics are no use though since the hard drive is not present. Anyway, put in a blank 120GB laptop drive. All discs and flash drives booted with no problems. I then booted from the Windows 7 DVD and installed Windows 7. Now it is back to the beginning of this whole problem. All bootable media is ignored except for the Windows 7 DVD and the hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it.
I have no clue what could be causing this behavior.
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