I have an older compaq, one of their All-In-One, iMac-ish ones. I've tried everything to boot from a CD. On the front, it says Compaq Presario CDS 520. I've played Music CD's in Windows 3.11 on it, I know the CD drive works. I've booted JoeOS disks, so I know the bootorder works. Any suggestions?

Booting is a function of the BIOS; you'll have to edit your BIOS configuration to boot from the CD.

Otherwise you could try Grub?  Doesn't that support booting from a CD after starting to boot from the hard drive?

If you can boot from floppys you can use a boot manager to boot from cd. I've used this before when I had the problem.

[quote]Booting is a function of the BIOS; you'll have to edit your BIOS configuration to boot from the CD.[/quote]Compaq went ahead and made their BIOS Setup user friendly. Ugh!

[quote]Otherwise you could try Grub?  Doesn't that support booting from a CD after starting to boot from the hard drive?[/quote]I've never really used it much, but IIRC, installing it is more of a hassel then a gain.

[quote]you could just use something like Daemon Tools or something that has an option to do that. i personally use Ahead Nero and so far it works great for me[/quote]This isn't exactly a current piece of equipment.

[quote]If you can boot from floppys you can use a boot manager to boot from cd. I've used this before when I had the problem.[/quote]
That looks VERY impressive! Thanks!

[pre]A:\>dir

  Volume in drive A has no label
  Volume Serial Number is 30AB-547E
  Directory of A:\

CWSDPMI  EXE
SBMINST  EXE

A:\>SMBINST
Bad command or file name[/pre]

-sigh-

EDIT:

-sigh- @ DOS not having spell check =p

EDIT: Its installed. Disk read error 0x01. I'll check it out on the Presario (I tested on the prolinea, the presario has a built in monitor, ugh!) later.