Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

[cornorstone]

I have a Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H motherboard. I have an ASUS DRW-24B3ST DVD optical drive. I can see the DVD set as first boot device in the bios, but when I actually boot, it boots from C drive. How to fix? I have a corrupted drive & need to get info off of it with with active undelete, but I need to boot from that DVD.

[profJim]

Check your motherboard user manual, bios chapter and see if pressing F12 when your system is posting will interrupt booting and display a screen that will let you choose your optical drive as the boot device.

You will probably need to press the F12 key repeatedly, once per second, for the boot device menu to work.

[stasio]

As you set the DVD set as first boot/HDD as second,you need Bootable CD or DVD to be inserted.
If DVD set is empty,you will boot strait to HDD (OS).

[cornorstone]

Check your motherboard user manual, bios chapter and see if pressing F12 when your system is posting will interrupt booting and display a screen that will let you choose your optical drive as the boot device.

You will probably need to press the F12 key repeatedly, once per second, for the boot device menu to work.

I did try this and nothing happened, it just booted from C:, but when I get home tonight I will give it another try. Thank you

[cornorstone]

As you set the DVD set as first boot/HDD as second,you need Bootable CD or DVD to be inserted.
If DVD set is empty,you will boot strait to HDD (OS).

As always in these forum things, I forget to mention little bits of information. Active Undelete, which is the program I am trying to run and is a self-booting program, will not boot from the DVD. Neither will 3 different flavors of Linux, Knoppix, Lindows, Seagate Diag/Install disk, Western Digital Diag disk, or even Windows 7 install disk. Sorry I did not mention all this previously. I am just so bent out of shape that I can't get this thing to boot. Sorry.

[cornorstone]

I did try this and nothing happened, it just booted from C:, but when I get home tonight I will give it another try. Thank you

So...continuously pressing F12 while booting gives me a Gigabyte dialogue box that says please select boot device. location 1 is my optical, location 2 is my C drive, locations 3 & 4 are other drives I have but not system, only data, location 5 says enter setup. under that are 2 arrows to move to select. Then it says enter to select boot device and finally esc to boot using defaults. The first location, my dvd location, is highlighted. But whether I press enter or esc. I still boot from hard drive, even though I have a bootable CD in the optical drive. The system sees it, reads from it, I have it in the first boot selection, it just won't boot first. HELP!!!1111 QQQQQQQ

[profJim]

From the boot device dialogue box, eject your optical disk by opening the tray.
Close the optical drive tray and as soon as the tray closes and the light comes on, boot from your optical drive.
It might take several tries to get the timing just right.

PITA? Yup!! But it should work.

[profJim]

You might have better luck putting your active undelete software on a bootable usb flash drive.

What are the specific sata port names that you have connected each of the drives to?

[cornorstone]

You might have better luck putting your active undelete software on a bootable usb flash drive.

What are the specific sata port names that you have connected each of the drives to?

do you mean SATA port 0 for C drive, SATA port 1 for 4 TB drive, and SATA port 5 for DVD drive?

[ibConners]

I seem to remember one time, a long time ago I was having a problem with installing windows xp on a dell system. Called dell support they diagnosed it, and sent a dude out to replace the MB. After replacement I had the same problem it would not boot to cd rom. Long story short I had a usb drive in a back port of my puter who the system thought it was the one. The all seeing... I removed the USB drive and all was normal again. Is this your problem? Maybe...maybe not....