The troubles with old optical drives \ VOGONS

The troubles with old optical drives

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First post, by Half-Saint

Posted on 2026-09-30, 10:01

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I wanted to check a few old VGA cards and tried to boot from an old copy of Ultimate Boot CD that never failed me in the past. It wouldn't boot. I have a stack of old optical drives, tried at least 7-8 different drives and all of them refused to work with this CD.

So, I thought, maybe the CD is too scratched and I burned a new one with CDBurnerXP at 16x speed. It stopped responding during CD verification. I killed the process and went to try the CD anyway. Needless to say, it didn't work either.

Now, what are the odds of 8 optical drives being faulty?

Reply 1 of 6, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2026-09-30, 10:50

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Is the boot process recognizing the CD drive.. something like "Press any key to boot from CD-ROM..." or the likes? Did that board boot from CD before?

Turbo XT 12MHz, EGA, MFM HDD
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
IBM BlueLightning 100MHz, CL5428, SB16, 4x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, RTX2060

Reply 2 of 6, by Half-Saint

Posted on 2026-09-30, 10:56

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wbahnassi wrote on 2026-09-30, 10:50:

Is the boot process recognizing the CD drive.. something like "Press any key to boot from CD-ROM..." or the likes? Did that board boot from CD before?

It's a Via Apollo 133A based socket 370 board so booting from CD shouldn't be a problem. However, no, I don't get anything on boot, just the standard error message in all caps where I can press any key and just get the same error again as no bootable media is found.

Reply 3 of 6, by Lylat1an

Posted on 2026-09-30, 11:06

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I use the ImgBurn program to write .ISO files to discs, it almost never fails.

Is the motherboard configured to use the port you connected your optical drives on?

Are the optical drives jumpered properly?

Can you extract the .ISO onto an alternate boot device such as a spare HDD?

Reply 4 of 6, by FullYes

Posted on 2026-09-30, 15:10

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What machine are you using to burn the CDs? What drive? I use my modern PC with an external samsung burner. I use the same software as you. Try burning the CD at a slower speed, or use a different blank - if you are like me and you have a stack of old CD/DVD blanks they may have gone bad.

If you haven't got any other CD blanks you can write a CD ISO to a DVD blank, obviously it's quite wasteful, but as long as all of your drives are at least capable of reading DVDs, it saves you having to have stacks of both.

System 1: K6-3+ 600MHz! MS-5158 (430TX), Voodoo3, AWE64
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System 4: i7-2600k, P8P67-M, GTX 460

Reply 5 of 6, by DaveDDS

Posted on 2026-09-30, 18:15

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First thing I'd do is determine if the problem is actually the optical drive (and it's config)
or something in the boot configuration.

Do you have another OS you can boot that can read the optical drive? (without trying to boot from it)

If you have a floppy drive, you could also use the ImageDisk boot floppy.
It will prompt you with an option to load several options, one of which is a CD/DVD drive.
You could boot it, tell it to mount the optical drive, then try and list files from it (DIR) after boot.

You can get the ImageDisk boot Floppy image from my "Daves Old Computers" site, you can write it to a disk with my XDISK tool (DOS), DSKIMG (Winblows) - both of which are included in the download archive, or something like WinImg if you refer.

https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ; "Daves Old Computers" ; SW dev addict best known:
ImageDisk: rd/wr ANY floppy PChw can ; Micro-C: compiler for DOS+ManySmallCPU ; DDLINK: simple/small filetransfer(w/o netSW)via Lan/Lpt/Com

Reply 6 of 6, by Half-Saint

Posted on 2026-10-01, 08:25

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Optical drives are all configured as Master and BIOS detects all of them.

I burned the new CD on a modern Windows 10 PC at 16x speed on an external Samsung USB optical drive capable of writing CDs and DVDs as well as RWs.

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