Laptop will not boot from CD

[111cix]

HP Pavilion zv5000

When booted into Windows XP, it recognizes most CDs, but when I put in a CD that is bootable, the CD drive whirs for a bit but nothing shows up.

When I reboot with a bootable CD in the drive, it whirs for a bit but ultimately moves on and boots straight to windows.

I have tried:
- changing the boot order (Floppy, CD, HD, Network)
- disabling the HD in the bios (it just stalls trying to boot from network)
- checked all the settings in the BIOS, including the bootable CD enable/disable setting under device security (set to enable) and running a HD Self-Test (Passes)
- deleting/reinstalling the cd rom device driver in the windows device manager
- tested the bootable CDs in another computer (they work)
- resetting BIOS to factory defaults through the BIOS screen

I am at my wit's end

 

[The_Other_One]

Stupid question, but have you confirmed your disk is bootable in other computers?

Does the disk do anything before going to the network boot? Have you tried any other optical drives, perhaps an external since it's a lappy... I had a Dell with a failing drive where it would boot from a CD, but it sometimes took a few times to get it to spin up. For the most part it worked fine in Windows.

 

[/\E]

Can you not press F12 or one of the F* keys to open the Boot Manager? You would be able to select a boot device if so.

There's a number of things that could be causing that but go ahead and try to get the Boot Manager screen.