# Western Digital DDO - Try to boot From CD, yet won't



## Hylian (Aug 23, 2005)

I have a 160GB Western Digital Hard Drive, and I have a Windows XP Home CD (no service packs are on the CD).

My harddrive is only recognized by my BIOS as 32MB, so I have to use WD Dynamic Drive Overlay to make it read as 137GB (since I don't have SP1, no 48bit LBA or whatever support).

The thing is, whe I try to boot from a CD using their software, I get the blue dialog box asking for me to press spacebar if I want to boot from a floppy, or "C" if i want to boot from a CD.

The thing is, when I try to boot from a CD (any bootable CD), it doesn't, and attempts to boot from the harddrive, and I get the Ntdlr (or something) error message, since I don't have an OS installed.

So get around this, I've been using those 6 floppies to assist with the install, because I cannot simply boot the computer from the CD, as if I do so, it's still recognized as 32MB (DDO HAS to be loaded first).

Yet what I'm wondering, is this a known issue, and is there a fix for it?


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## sgtdog (Aug 25, 2005)

I think I may have had the same problem as you, only I was trying to boot from a diskwiping program.  My Dell XPS wouldn't boot from the CD, but went to the hardrive first.  I had to change my computer startup sequence.  Here is a link that explains it.  It's not too difficult to do.  
http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipe-your-hard-drive-help.php#question1


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## 1337cshacker (Aug 25, 2005)

go to bios, make "first boot device" the letter of your cd drive, save settings and restart, now you computer will boot from CD, not A:


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## Hylian (Aug 25, 2005)

I'll try to explain my situation again.

The Dynamic Drive Overlay software is in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of my hard drive.  This is the only way for my computer to recognize the partition of the 137GB of my 160GB HD (28 bit LBA limitation).

I need to have my hard drive boot first so the windows installer sees the 137GB partition.  If I boot from the CD first, the installer sees 32GB partition only, and even if I install on that, my computer just keeps reseting when trying to load windows.

So to be clear, I have no choice but to use the Drive Overlay software, and boot from my hard drive.

The DDO software, has three options:  Boot from CD by pressing "c" or boot from floppy by pressing spacebar.  Booting from the harddrive takes place after a few seconds if no other choice is made.

The problem is, when i press C to boot from the CD, it doesn't, and jumps to the hard drive boot sequence

My concern is to those using DDO v9.87, and are having the same CD problems.  The only way around this problem I know of is using the 6 floppies to set up windows.  I was simply looking to see if anyone knew of a fix for the DDO software, or another work around.

Thanks for your help though.


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