laptop won't boot from floppy or cd

[wildoscar]

I have an old compaq presario 2100 laptop XP SP3 and it used to be able to boot from cd . i was trying to boot to a live linux but it just ignores when i set the bios to boot from cd and goes on to boot from hard drive.

Ditto with floppy drive. I was trying to boot to ms dos with an ms dos startup disk creed on the compaq but when i set the bios to boot from floppy it just ignores that and boots from the hard drive. it will not even boot from a windows disk

I even tried the return to factory image cds which i have successfully used in the past but won't boot from them. I was only testing to see would it boot not going to restore. Anyway it ignored them too.

I note from bios that it is set to have the hard drive detected  automatically but no way to change that and was presumably like that when i could boot from cd. How do I  test the bios ?

[wildoscar]

I have an old compaq presario 2100 laptop XP SP3 and it used to be able to boot from cd . i was trying to boot to a live linux but it just ignores when i set the bios to boot from cd and goes on to boot from hard drive.

Ditto with floppy drive. I was trying to boot to ms dos with an ms dos startup disk creed* on the compaq but when i set the bios to boot from floppy it just ignores that and boots from the hard drive. it will not even boot from a windows disk

I even tried the return to factory image cds which i have successfully used in the past but won't boot from them. I was only testing to see would it boot not going to restore. Anyway it ignored them too.

I note from bios that it is set to have the hard drive detected  automatically but no way to change that and was presumably like that when i could boot from cd. How do I  test the bios ?

*should read ms dos startup disk created on the compaq

[hcooke]

If hard drive is detected in bios, that's a good thing.  There should be no reason to alter that setting. 

Whatever I want to boot from, I make it the primary boot device, I disable the rest of the boot devices.    Did you try that ?

Are you trying to boot with another device because it won't boot into xp ?   

[wildoscar]

 i did not try disable other devices. how do you make t the primary boot device? i want to  boot from live linux to access a floppy that cannot be accessed from xp. thanks

[wildoscar]

I disable the rest of the boot devices.    Did you try that ?

If I do and then it will not boot from floppy or cd how do i get back into the computer, how will it boot again?