On the boot menu screen ( splash??) is there something I can type in " boot Option" to tell it to boot from CD-Rom??
thanks in advance
-cheers
If your BIOS is set to boot from CD first then if you put a CD in it boots and you never see Grub.
This is the splash screen from GRUB on the HD? Too late already. You have to set your BIOS to boot from the CD.
yes, I have tried that. I go into the BIOS menu and change the setting to boot from CD-ROM, than save/exit…and tect show up saying " GRUB v1.5 is loading " than it immediatly cuts to the boot menu ( bootsplash - do I have this correct, I’m new)…
See previous efforts here GRUN Dominates, and is taking over everything!!! - openSUSE Forums
thanks guys…
-cheers
No, it means that the CD wasn’t booted. Either it isn’t bootable or your drive is bad.
Or you didn’t actually set the cd to boot device in bios.
I have the same issue with my MoBo (MSI K9N Neo) - the DVD drives are set as first boot medium, still it always boots from my HDs. Maybe you are as lucky as me and your BIOS offers a key for something like a popup to choose directly from which media to boot.
The CD works. I tested it on anouther cpu and it booted of the cd immediatly, first try.
The Drive is working fine, I put the cd in, or any other cd, and it mounts and reads the cd and open the contents immediatly.
I have gone into the BIOS menu more times than I would like to admit, made changes, saved than exit, and immediatly GRUB pops up.
Is it really going to make a difference if I wait to put the cd in until after I save and quit BIOS menu? … won’t that just encourage it to go directly to boot menu?
…any more ideas??? … hopefully 
-cheers
Is it really going to make a difference if I wait to put the cd in until after I save and quit BIOS menu?
Are you referring to my comment here? If so, you got me wrong, because what I meant was a key being offered when the BIOS starts (not from within the BIOS-settings), it should look something like →this. In my case, the shortcut to launch this popup is F11, but I suppose every BIOS has a different key (and some BIOSes do not offer any at all).
What position is your CD drive in? Some BIOSes will only boot from a primary or secondary master, although the OS can happily read a CD later. Also is the drive detected or marked as a CD drive by the BIOS? If that position is disabled in the BIOS, again no booting can happen from it, although the OS will have no problems using the CD, because it is independent of the BIOS.
If you can usb boot
dd the .iso to a pen drive and boot from that
on this particular computer ( Toshiba satellite laptop m45-s265), the esc key upon startup will bring uop the BIOS menu. This BIOS does not offer the option to boot from USB.
I honestly don’t know about the postion of the CD drive. I do know that there is only one, and Have installed 11.2 on this laptop with this same cd twice. I never went in to BIOS and changed anything. Is it possible somehow that GRUB is just overriding everything.
At this point its not even about re-installing, now its personal and want to fix this discrepency.
Hope this info helps…
-cheers
If it’s a laptop, then it would be in the right position as is. I think your CD drive has gone south (or north, depending on your hemisphere). Does it boot ANY CD at all? If not, you’ll need to look for a replacement. There is another possibility and that is the laser is worn out and cannot boot burnt CDs any more, only pressed CDs.
The BIOS gets control before GRUB.
I suppose you could try disconnecting the disk drive to convince yourself that it still cannot boot off the CD. Usually the disk drive is easy to reach on laptops.
I can put the CD in, and it will open folders ,etc. but even though I can do that, your saying I may still not be able to boot with it? just to make sure I have this right…
Yes. Optical drives are amazingly cheap pieces of precision equipment but oh so prone to fail in odd ways.
This is a hardware/BIOS problem and has nothing at all to do with the OS or boot manager (Grub)
The BIOS takes initial control of the machine and decides where to read the boot code. ie from CD, USB, Floppy drive, Hard drive. It is supposed to go down the boot list and see if it can find the boot for each device. If it finds any it boots to that device. If not it moves on to the next device. Until it finds a MBR or exhausts the list.
Just curious.
lsscsi
DVHENRY-
lsscsi gives me this :
[0:0:0:0] disk ATA TOSHIBA MK1032GA AB21 /dev/sda
[1:0:0:0] cd/dvd MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-831S 1.40 /dev/sr0
-cheers
okay, so I attempted to boot the computer off of a flash drive by going into BIOS and setting FDD as the boot priority.
still, it goes directly to GRUB.
There is something screw with your BIOS