"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
My eMachines W3118 came with a restoration DVD for the factory
installed XP home, which includes all the drivers.

Many computers that include disks, and all that don't have some way of
creating a restore disk from the install partition or files.

It depends upon the manufacturer how insistant it is. One brand I saw would
not let you do anything with the newly installed windows system until the
burning of DVDs (install Windows, provided apps) was finished.

Another made you click "not now" every hour until you did.

Other's just gave you a one time notice, it was up to you to figure out how
to do it if you canceled it.

One even included blank DVDs.


I've seen several new computers that told you to burn a restore DVD,
and gave you one try. One had a bad drive, and others had corrupt files
on the hard drive, which failed, in warranty.


The one I am using now, and MSI Wind U100, included Hebrew Windows on the hard
drive with an insistant option to burn disks and a set of English DVDs. Note
that the computer did not have a DVD or optical drive of any kind.

Apple used to include installation DVDs of MacOS with all of their computers,
including the MacBook Air line, which has no optical drive. Now they include
a USB memory stick with it. I expect netbook manufacturers will do the same for
Windows too.

Back to the original question, does the BIOS offer a boot menu, or a setup key?

With the boot menu, you can just choose the DVD drive, with a setup menu,
which comes up after your press the key (eventually), you can change the
boot order to include the DVD drive first.

BTW, did you try the A drive option? It might try to boot from the floppy and
after giving up try the DVD.

Geoff.xsxc
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Occam's Razor does not apply to electronics. If something won't turn on, it's
not likely to be the power switch.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid™ on it, because it's
Teflon coated.