IBM ThinkPad T22's DVD-ROM drive won't detect bootable discs properly.

[Klamath686]

Hello there, so I've been testing out bootable CD discs on my ThinkPad T22. At first, the laptop could detect the drives just fine, but then later on, the laptop suddenly redirects me to the Network Boot screen. Yet I tested the same optical discs before and after I did them on my T22 on my other computers and they could detect them fine. Are there anyways to solve this problem? Do I need to replace my optical drive on my T22? I'll highly appreciate the solutions to this problem.

[RealBlackStuff]

Those drives are ~15 years old by now, so failures are bound to happen.
I suggest looking for another drive, such as a CDRW/DVD.
Get the T20/T21/T22/T23 manual from the HMM link at the top of this page, it has the P/N or FRU for those parts.
Alternative: get a PCMCIA USB2.0-card and a more modern external USB-drive.

[rkawakami]

I'm going to make an assumption that when you wrote you are having problems detecting "bootable CD drives" you actually mean bootable DISKS. And that you have properly configured BIOS to place the optical drive first in the boot order.

I'm further going to assume that you are indeed using a DVD-ROM drive and not a CD or CDRW drive, inside a T22. If that's the case, some of the oldest DVD-ROM drives can have problems reliably reading CD-R and CD-RW disks. So if your bootable disk(s) are on R or RW media, about the only thing you can do is replace the DVD-ROM drive with something "newer" as RealBlackStuff indicated.

You can replace the drive with one from the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM). That is, use a genuine IBM part that is a CDRW drive. I would avoid replacing your drive with a plain old CD drive; they can have the same problems with reading R/RW disks. Or you can "upgrade" to something that is NOT in the HMM by using aftermarket drives and performing a little bit of surgery. If you're interested in that route we can discuss it further here.

[Klamath686]

I'm going to make an assumption that when you wrote you are having problems detecting "bootable CD drives" you actually mean bootable DISKS. And that you have properly configured BIOS to place the optical drive first in the boot order.

Yes, I did some typos speaking of what I just quoted about the grammar mistakes you were trying to point out, and I edited my forum post too recently.