FoxHound

I've had pretty good experience with Windows. No issues on my end.

Yes and no. What you can try using is PLoP: http://www.plop.at/ http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html It should work, but I don't think it will work in a sequence like the one you proposed (pre-booting from USB Flash, then switch to CD/DVD). I presume you will have to copy it to the internal hard disk. Since it is chainloadable from both DOS and NT/2K/XP/2003's NTLDR/BOOT.INI (and from /Vista/2008/7), you shouldn't have a problem in using it even without actually installing it. jaclaz This program showed some promise till I found out that "Only USB mass storage devices are supported. The USB support allows to boot from usb harddisk, usb sticks and usb cardreaders. USB floppys and CD/DVD drives are not working. " I have to wait till they update it or find some workaround

I have an HP Pavillion dv6647cl laptop with a broken cd/dvd internal drive. Replacing it wasn't an option so I just bought a USB external CD/DVD combo drive. The problem is it's not letting me boot bootable CD's from the external drive. I know for a fact that my BIOS supports USB booting and I have no problem booting USB flash drives with it. The BIOS itself is flashed to the latest version (HP - F.32 - Phoenix Bios). I've tried several Windows and Linux bootable CD's that are bootable but it still won't boot from the USB external optical drive. Is there any USB Flash drive program I can boot first so it can then boot from the external DVD/CD drive? Thanks in advance.