Tech Forum

tried several times to boot from dban on xp dell 740 machine after selecting f12 and choosing cdrom drive it goes back and loads normally. Tried an older and newer version of dban and it didn't make a difference. Any suggestions?

After F12 and selecting the drive, did it ask you to "press any key to boot from cd..."?

Verify your CD drive is working. I'd suggest booting normally and checking to see if you can read a stamped (mass-produced) CD.

Note that there is also a CMOS setting to block booting from removable media. But I'd think you wouldn't have the CD option to boot from. It's not unusual for a drive's grease to get sticky and cause the "sled" with the reading laser to not work properly.

Assuming I'm right, you'll need to either borrow a CD drive or load DBAN onto a USB drive.

But first, set the machine so that the CD is lying horizontal. I've found a new units don't like being set vertically.

Did you go into the BIOS menu to check that the loading sequence makes the CD-ROM bootable, and prioritized before the local hard disk? If not, you can change the settings to make it so.

Cd-rom is the first bootable Device. I'll check and see if plays a regular cd.

Well still no luck. I hooked up another cd-rom and set it up to boot first from it. Same results as the cd-rom that is in the computer. Tried the newest version of dban and an older version of dban. Setup doesn't allow booting from usb drive. Any suggestions would be helpful. When I boot up it shows going to the cdrom but then loads windows instead.

How are the DBAN disks being created? You might carefully test one on some other computer -- just to the boot step, no further, to avoid nuking anything. That would confirm that the disk is correctly created and bootable.

(If someone created your "DBAN" disk by just copying the .iso image file as a file, that would not create a bootable disk, just a copy of the file on the CD.)

RossEvans wrote:(If someone created your "DBAN" disk by just copying the .iso image file as a file, that would not create a bootable disk, just a copy of the file on the CD.)

I wonder if RossEvans is right. Did you copy the ISO file to the DVD or copy the ISO *image* to the DVD? I like to use a free app called ISO Recorder to burn ISO files to DVD. http://alexfeinman.com/W7.htm Once it's installed, you right-click an ISO file and use the right-click menu option to "Copy image to CD/DVD." Give this a try and see if you get different results.

I will give it a try thanks

I guess I'm confused on what you want. I downloaded dban from their website and burned it to a cd. I did this on a dell windows 8 computer. What are the steps to copy the ISO image instead of drag the dban file over and burning it.