No bootable disk, sometimes

[dauerbach]

Also, relating to the sick laptop that was given to me, it's illness is that when you turn it on half the time it says it can't find a boot drive. When I go into BIOS is see boot order as C:, floppy, CD/ROM. Now it doesn't have a floppy, but when I put a bootable disk into the CD/ROM it doesn't recognize that either. Rather than hardware, it sounds to me like corrupted BIOS. Any advice from people who really know about computers.

[erislover]

Well, the boot order doesn't necessarily describe the hardware the BIOS believes to be installed. You'll have to check during the POST messages that any hardware is actually detected. BIOS needs to be told, or at least suggested, what devices are on which IDE bus.