Booting a T30 from a DVD writer

[semaphore]

Hello all,

I have a T30 that I bought refurbished from ebay. I replaced the CD writer drive that came with it, with a Multi-Burner Ultrabay 2000 DVD-RW writer, which seems to work fine, except that I cannot boot with it.

More elaborate explanation: Before I replaced the drive, I installed Ubuntu, with grub for multi-boot, but there was some problem with the upgrade to Ubuntu 6.10 that I was trying to do, so now I need to boot the laptop from the DVD drive with an Ubuntu CD. But whenever I try to do so (by using the CD-ROM drive option in the boot device list (by pressing F12) or by using the BIOS setup), the CD seems to spin for a while and then it just goes straight to the grub menu. I have tried other boot CDs (Mandrake or Mandriva for example), just to see if it was the CD, but I can't boot from those CD's either.

Anybody have any experience or insight into this?

Thanks in advance,
AT.

[agarza]

Did you try using the original CD writer your T30 came with? Maybe a firmware update on your new drive could help the problem

[truk]

The firmware update is most likely right. The T30s were not originally built to have a DVD-RAM drive, and therefore were not specifically deigned to support it. Luckily, ultrabays WERE designed to be hot swappable. I believe the firmware is on an ISO, so you probably will be required to burn it, boot from the old CD-rom, and then switch them out (it's a good idea to have a copy of the firmware in both.)

Hope this helps!
Truk