Okay. I am installing Macrium backup program and I made an emergency boot disk as part of that. I wanted to of course try to boot up with it just to be sure it works. I put it in Drive D, turned off the machine and then hit F2 to go to the boot menu. surprise, No. 1 was removable disk which made me think it searches there and then goes to No. 2, the hard drive and that it must have been that way for a few years. So, does it default, or, did making the disk change the order? I can’t tell if the disk works because if it doesn’t, it just defaults to the hard drive. I know I must be overthinking this somehow. Help, please on how I can be sure the emergency disk works.:eek:
Did you try just booting the machine with the disc in the drive to see what happens? It should spin up and attempt to run from the boot disc.
Hi Joey. Well, it all happens so fast. The drive spins and then the machine boots but how do I know it’s not just defaulting to the hard drive before it boots up? It might be spinning and then it’s unsuccessful so it goes to the hard drive. OMG.
If I could just find something that says: the machine boots up according to the list and goes to number one and that’s it. Fini. It won’t boot unless the disk is okay. Or I manually change the order back to hard drive as no. 1.
You need to get into your computer’s BIOS, the firmware that it loads even before loading an OS. You will have to press one of the F keys right at boot up to do this. The screen will show a text message telling you which one (“Press F8 to enter BIOS settings” etc.). The message might not be on the screen for very long, and you may only have about a second to press it, so it can sometimes be annoying to get into.
Once you do there will be a setting under BOOT OPTIONS showing BOOT DRIVE ORDER (exact words may vary). You’ll want to set the DVD drive to number one and the hard drive to number two. Sometimes even after doing this there will still be a message saying PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD and you will only have a few seconds before it defaults to booting from the hard drive. This is because booting from the CDROM is not the usual way and it wants to be sure. If the CD/DVD disc you made isn’t bootable for some reason it will probably show a short message like NO BOOTABLE MEDIA FOUND for a few seconds and then just boot from the hard drive as usual.
Note once you change the boot order in the BIOS it will stay that way until you go in and change it again. The OS (i.e. Windows) cannot access or change the BIOS settings (usually). And be careful not to change anything else in the BIOS as it can have unwanted results*!*
Unplug HD and then try to boot. If computer just laughs silently at you and refuses to do anything, boot disk is not working. I have never seen a MB out of the box that had HD as #1 device & not an optical drive first in a long long time.
Telling a noob to get in to BIOS without being there to fix the broken computer for him afterwords is not friendly IMO.
Booting and launching the OS are two different things.
YMMV
Well maybe, but cracking open the case and unplugging hardware is not exactly something I would recommend a newbie try either! 
As you say the CD/DVD drive is almost always set as the first boot drive at the factory so either the user is missing the prompt to boot from CD like I suggest or their boot CD wasn’t made correctly. I use Macrium as well and the Create Rescue CD function is pretty straightforward so I don’t think it’s that.
The OP is a bit confusing. Some computers’ BIOS will look for a bootable CD/DVD at boot time, then proceed to the HDD if none is found. Others are set by default to go directly to the HDD and you have to hit a particular key (varies with BIOS) to boot from CD/DVD.
If #1 boot device is the CD/DVD, and the Macrium disk didn’t boot, then it wasn’t burned correctly. There’s absolutely no doubt when the Macrium recovery disk boots – it’s either the Linux-based or the Windows PE based recovery platform and doesn’t look anything like any ordinary version of Windows.
To be sure, hit whatever key is required by your BIOS to force a boot device – with Dell systems it’s F12, with others it might be ESC or something else. Tell it to boot from CD/DVD. If you don’t get the Macrium recovery environment you haven’t burned the disc correctly.
Yeah, what wolfpup said. When the computer starts, have your right hand on the F11, F12, and Del keys. Have your left hand on the F1, F2, and ESC keys. Frantically mash all six as soon as you push the power button, and some sort of menu should come up to let you choose either to boot directly from a drive or at least to let you set the boot drive in the BIOS.
Don’t change anything other than the boot drive.
If you fuck it up, just restart and mash those six keys again and boot from the HDD.
I put the disk in and turned my machine on and started pushing F12 and the boot menu came up. It was set on D drive and it started booting up and the drive was working away and the boot up was successful.
Then I turned it off again and reset the boot menu to the hard drive. And again, it was successful.
So, I’m going to assume the disk is working properly.
I have one more question about the external hard drive that I’m putting the backup on and I’ll post it separately.
I appreciate all your input.
Just a note: You don’t really need to reset the computer’s first boot drive back to the C: drive, you can leave it as the D: (the CD/DVD). Reason is that as long as you don’t leave a bootable disc in the optical drive it will just skip past it to the hard drive each boot up. And if you do accidentally leave a bootable disc in, you can just stop the boot up by hitting CTRL ALT DEL and removing the disc.
Makes it simpler for the times when you do need to boot to a recovery disc, you’re already good to go. As stated above most systems have the CD/DVD drive set as the first boot device by default anyway…