Trouble booting from cd

[Pantomimehorse]

Ive been given a old pc from a friend who was upgrading their office, the thing is actually unused but was set up to go on their network with so much secuirty software I just wanted to format it and reload windows, I was given the restore disk so figured this wouldnt be a problem... well the problem seems to be it wont boot to the cd, it just goes into windows everytime, \ive looked in the bios and its set to boot to cd first so thats not the issue , its not the cd either as ive tried another I have that i know works and get the same problem..... anyway have any ideas what i can do ?

[daverave999]

Is the restore CD actually bootable?

[Pantomimehorse]

yep but to make sure it wasnt the cd i also tried another cd which is bootable and no luck

[Watkins]

press any key or space when in the initial black screen (fast), had to do that on an old acer I had so that may help.

[eggopp]

If its an HP or Compaq, you can press F11 on boot up quickly to enter a hidden partition to restore to factory settings

[Boss Hog]

Generally, a restore disk just contains all the relevant drivers, etc for that machine and us not normally bootable. You need a windows disk first.

[Pantomimehorse]

the cd sales BOOTABLE on it but just to be sure I have also tried a windows cd which again it seems the pc reads it but then just goes into windows

[Lads2000]

You sure it's note cd drive have you tried playing anything using it I.e. A cd just to make sure it can read data. I had a faulty one once sounded like it was spinning but then wouldn't read.

[daverave999]

Yeah I'd agree with that. Try a different CD drive if you have one?

[Deano]

A lot of BIOSes allow you to press F12 for the boot menu, but alas that's mostly desktop boards.

[skyhigh]

has it only got the one cd drive, or has it got a dvd drive, maybe pointing to wrong drive. Our lasses laptop has a built in recovery partition and you need to press F7 to execute it.

[Pantomimehorse]

sorted now thanks, turned out there was a sub menu in the bios which had the Cd drive locked which was strange...