[mikeofuva]

Product: 3000 J115 7387-26U
Operating system: Windows XP Home
Original description: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+, 1GB, 250GB 7200RPM S-ATA HDD, no diskette drive, PCI/PCIe Tower (4x4), NVIDIA GeForce 6100, Multi-Burner Plus 16x, Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet, 56K modem, USB Memory Card Reader, Windows XP Home

Above are my system specs. I would like to upgrade to XP Pro x 64 but am unable to boot from the CD. I have the latest version of the BIOS installed and have tried changeing the boot order. The BIOS looks at the CD, it spins up for a few seconds and then proceeds to boot XP from the HDD. I have Ubuntu 9.10 desktop (iso burned with InfraRecorder) but have not tried booting with it yet. Not sure how my hdd is set-up so I'm hesitant to try booting the ubuntu CD.

Is it possible that this is somehow built into the BIOS? I know the drive works.

Thanks for any assistance.

Mike

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Did you go back into the BIOS and look at the boot order again? If the first boot device is not the cdrom drive, you forgot to save and exit the bios after changing the order. So it reverted back to first booting the HD. If it is set to boot from the cdrom drive then i would suspect that the windows CD has a scratch or smudge on it that cannot be read by the cdrom drive. Carefully cleaning the cdrom with a microfiber cloth may fix that. Start at the center of the CD and wipe straight out to clean. Be careful of any dirt on the cloth or disk. If you have doubts wash the disk with clean water then wipe with a microfiber cloth( same cloth you buy for cleaning LCD screens).

SRX660

[SRX660]

Did you go back into the BIOS and look at the boot order again? If the first boot device is not the cdrom drive, you forgot to save and exit the bios after changing the order. So it reverted back to first booting the HD. If it is set to boot from the cdrom drive then i would suspect that the windows CD has a scratch or smudge on it that cannot be read by the cdrom drive. Carefully cleaning the cdrom with a microfiber cloth may fix that. Start at the center of the CD and wipe straight out to clean. Be careful of any dirt on the cloth or disk. If you have doubts wash the disk with clean water then wipe with a microfiber cloth( same cloth you buy for cleaning LCD screens).

SRX660

[mikeofuva]

Well, I was finally able to boot from the CD (sorry I did that but that is another story). What I did was hit f12 during boot and that took me in to the change boot order screen. Once there I selected the CD-ROM drive and hit enter. The PC began rebooting and as it was doing this I hit the delete key and viola, the x64 WinXP booted. Unfortunately I was unable to find my volume license key and so I accidentally hosed my existing XP Home installation. I grabbed my trusty XP Pro upgrade CD (for which I do have my license key) and proceeded. If I had done that first I would have an XP Pro installation which was my original intent. Now I'm scrambling around trying to recover all of software and settings. Of course the new installation is horribly compromised. Ubuntu is looking better and better all the time. If only I were 40 years younger (or my brain was).

Thanks for all the suggestions and help, this is a great site.

Peace,
Mike B