Hi, I was wondering, is it possable to boot from a USB CD-ROM drive? I tried playing with the BIOS settings, but no luck. This is unfortunate as I have burned a bootable operating system to a CD-RW, and the drive all ready installed cant read CD-RWs.

is it possable to boot from a USB CD-ROM drive Only if BIOS support it. I have burned a bootable operating system to a CD-RW CD-RW can be bootable only if the file you burned to it is an ISO image written with disk at once (DAO). i_XpUser

You can only boot from USB if the BIOS allows it. If there is no setting to do that in BIOS then I am afraid you will not be able to. Unless your CDROM drive is very old, there is no reason why it should not be able to read a CD-RW. The other possibility is that your CDROM is indeed very old and does not support multi-session CDs. In that case you could try writing your CD-RW as a single session CD-RW. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

XPUser, would an external USB device be considered a Removable Device, which is a boot option in some systems? Life's more painless for the brainless.

Yes. Removable devices are USB/firewire hot-pluggable external storage devices (HD, flash drives, etectera) i_XpUser

XpUser you're a bloody genius ... thank you ever so much, 'einstein' :-) now this is off topic but i have been re-installing XP recently on this machine and all of a sudden NERO took 5 minutes instead of 2 1/2 to complete a CD while trying to finalize the disk for about 3 minutes (sometimes failing to do so - 25% are coasters :-). first i thought it could be an issue with different bus drivers or something weird and only NOW it dawned on me that nero6 (unlike 7) is using TAO by default instead of DAO ... problem solved! cheers, m8 :-) Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.'