October 7, 2005 10:24 AM

Regarding the physical settings of the drives on your computer, I would go with the CDROM drive set as "master" on the secondary IDE (no other drives attached to "slave"), and the hard drive you want to use set to "master" or "CS (cable select)" on the primary IDE (no other drives on the "slave" on this one either). If your PC can see the CDROM drive and HDD in the bios on these settings, then (in theory) it should work. You may have to try the "master" or "cable select" jumper on the HDD to see which one works if one or the other doesn't the first time.

Now, regarding burning the ISO, if you have a burning program installed (you said you have NTI, which I use as well), then it should recognize ISO's right off the bat. No need to actually open the program and choose options. All you should need to do is put a CD in the CD burner, double click on the ISO, and NTI will open a window, probably showing your burn speed, asking how many copies you want to make, and have an OK and Cancel button... pressing OK will begin the burning process (options may not be exactly the same but close enough). You don't need to choose to make it a bootable CD... when burned the correct files are already on the CD making it bootable.

October 12, 2005 11:56 AM

Cannot boot on my CD

I cannot boot from the CD on my PC. I have tried all eight (8) combinations of CD primary / HD slave etc. and the only situation that will even recognize both the CD and the HD in the Setup is CD secondary, HD primary, CD master with the HD set on anything (SL,MA or CS). The error message when trying to boot from the CD is: "Loading spec packet failed. Trying to wing it. Failed to located CD Rom - boot failed."

I know that the system recognizes the CD and that the 1st boot device is the CD. I can view that information in the Setup.

What should I try next? ... Andy

October 12, 2005 12:35 PM

Make sure that, if you have the option in the bios, you make the CDROM drive bootable. Also, something I have seen that worked on this exact error message... make the floppy the first boot device, THEN the CDROM, then the HDD. This seems to have made a difference on some machines even without booting to a floppy, it still wanted to look for a floppy drive first for some reason.

October 12, 2005 1:14 PM

Cannot boot on my CD

dallas4u said:

Make sure that, if you have the option in the bios, you make the CDROM drive bootable. Also, something I have seen that worked on this exact error message... make the floppy the first boot device, THEN the CDROM, then the HDD. This seems to have made a difference on some machines even without booting to a floppy, it still wanted to look for a floppy drive first for some reason.

Thanks for the suggestions. In all 8 cases (9 if you count the one time I tried CS for the HD) I have specified to boot from the CD if the system recognized the CD-Rom drive.

Your other suggestions was interesting -- about setting the 1st boot drive to the floppy. I could do that, but the options for booting 2nd-3rd-4th drives did not include the CD-Rom. So I could not do that.

There was another option re. booting, about the speed. My setting was "turbo" so I changed it to "deturbo," thinking that the speed might have an effect. No luck. Still get the boot failure messages about the spec packet failure, trying to wing it, and failure to locate the CD Rom.

October 12, 2005 2:35 PM

dallas4u said:

anschwartz,

How old is this PC? It sounds like it may be pretty old (turbo and non-turbo modes). Another option may be to may sure you are using the most up to date bios version for the motherboard.

If all else fails for this PC, if you have any friends with PC's, or even one at work that you may be able to use, it may be the way to go. I'm lucky... I sold my home desktop for a laptop a few months ago, but I'm a Systems Admin and am around computer hardware all day at work, so I have access to PCs if I need them.

You might be right. The computer is a Gateway Pentium-Pro, 200 mHz from January of 1997. Not a bad machine, in its day. But I have another computer I can try. I will do that.

October 12, 2005 3:03 PM

dallas4u said:

Good luck... let us know how it goes. I know that Linux will run on some pretty slow hardware (by Microsofts standards, anyway), but I have also seen that error posted in conjunction with Linux problems on older machines with possibly outdated bios (possibly somehow incompatible).

I will try the newer machine. I had hesitated, since the newer PC is a DELL, and there have been some cautions posted on this site about using the DELL computers to format the hard disks. But I will try and let everybody know.

October 12, 2005 5:32 PM

Looking in the Dell Optiplex GX260 in my office (the one I actually used to bake my 200GB drive in my DVR), it doesn't look like it will matter which IDE cable is actually used... just which port on the motherboard it is plugged into. The 'blue' IDE cable, signified by blue pull tabs, is plugged into my HDD on mine, and the 'orange' into my CD drive.

All I can tell you is my CD drive is set for CS (or cable select) and is the only thing on the secondary IDE cable. My HDD was set for CS and the only thing on my primary IDE cable. I made sure and checked the bios to make sure it saw both drives, and that ONLY Primary Drive 0 (nothing on second primary slot) and Secondary Drive 0 (nothing on second secondary slot) were set.

October 12, 2005 5:45 PM

I must have a screwy computer than...because mine worked the opposite

October 15, 2005 1:42 PM

matt said:

Yeah, I had used a dell to format my HDD. Make sure you use the BLUE IDE cable to your CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive and the ORANGE IDE cable to the formatting HDD. (I'm using a Demention 8200).

Well, that seems to have done the trick. Newer computer, my DELL. It did not like the cable I connected to the HD, so then I swapped it for a different one, and the job ran OK.

Opened the TIVO, installed the new HD and everything seems to be just fine. I will take a wait-and-see approach, since the stuttering I was experiencing was not as prevalent immediately after having booted the machine. But, so-far, so-good.

Thanks to everybody for the advice and encouragement.