compaq armada 7770 not booting to cd

[carlosponti]

i cant get into the bios to set it to boot to cd so it immediately goes into the ntloader for windows. i cannot install fedora until i can boot from the cd. another thing is i do not have a floppy that i can have installed at the same time as the cd-rom they are in the same interchangable slot.

[Snide]

does your laptop have a boot selection where you press a key and you can select which device you want to boot from?

[carlosponti]

it doesnt display anything. i found some instructions that say you have to use the floppy create a boot disk create a dos drive partition then reboot with the cd-rom in and when dos somes up change drives to the cd-rom to run setup. does anyone know a better way of handling this.

[fpmchu]

During boot up, have you tried some common BIOS keys like "delete" or "F1"?

If you really can't get into BIOS (which I highly doubt), then you do need to boot into floppy. If you don't like DOS you can't try some Linux minimalistic floppies that are readily available.

Try harder to get into BIOS though.

Frank

[carlosponti]

i have look on google and cant find anything either the later armada 7800 had a bios that took up part of the hard drive and you had to hit the key F10 to get into it. however i have tried most every key i could think of that were bios entry keys ie del insert F1 F10 esc but none did anything. i know it has a bios just i dont think its accessable. you can see the ram test at boot then immediately goes to nt loader with 3 versions of windows.

[fpmchu]

In that case, then a boot floppy is your simplest solution. Either a dos or Linux floppy would work. It's not that difficult to get either to work.

Frank