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grovenetsupport

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Dell PowerEdge 2600 wont boot off SCSI CD Rom

I need to get an OS back on a PE 2600. Obviously she is old but I need it to load once more so I thought simple put in CD and away you go. I cant for the life of me get it to boot off its SCSI CD Rom drive. It lights up and you can put the CD in so all seems fine but it wont recognise it on boot.

Any ideas as I cant use USB boot due to age etc
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Zac Harris
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Make sure your disc is actually bootable. Normally if the CD drive spins and the light flashes its trying to read the disc but it cannot find the boot sector. Also, make sure you are not using unsupported media (i.e. a DVD in a CD-ROM drive etc...)
Another thing is to make sure the boot order is correct in the BIOS. Try making the CD drive the first device to see if that helps.
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grovenetsupport

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Tried that and I am using the Dell disc that came with it to load the drivers etc. The boot sequence is booting with CD Rom first but it doesn't seem to look at it i.e. I hit space on the others hard drive and FDD and it didn't say non bootable device etc?
What OS are you trying to load?
2003 Server but I have tried all the known boot discs I know work for any OS but it doesn't read the disc at the point I would expect it to
I had same problem with a different model Dell server.  Problem was that I needed to upgrade the CD drive firmware
Can you hear the disc spinning? Make sure you pay attention to the screen during boot...there is that 5 second time when it prompts you to press a key to boot from CD.
It reads the disc but to be honest I have done this for years and I was hoping for someone to say something stupid I was missing. I have just ordered a replacement unit off ebay as its worth the £25 to try it
I should also mention that there are sometimes BIOS updates required for motherboards to even boot certain operating systems from CD in the first place.   Not all BIOS's will even support SCSI boot loaders.  You just might drop an email to the dell community support site to even see if you can boot a SCSI device with whatever adapter you have with your BIOS.

Another thing to check ... SCSI TERMINATION!!
It is unlikely SCSI ... it is more likely the built-in tray which is IDE, meaning that this is most likely an incorrectly created CD, a bad CD, or a bad CD drive.

Make sure that the CD drive is at the top of your BIOS boot sequence AND that it is enabled (checkmark to the left).
It is SCSI on this model and it was a faulty CD drive. I have put a new one in today and away it went
I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 0 points for grovenetsupport's comment #a41418465

for the following reason:

Solved the problem myself
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PowerEdgeTech
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The part that was ordered is identical and I have tested the other drive in Windows and still fails and in another server
Same or different firmware?   That is the key, and thanks for following up.  I couldn't care less about points, but wanted to know if it was firmware that was the problem, because i have seen that before.
I have doubled checked and it is the same. I was hoping for  clever trick as i thought i was missing the point that was all but it does seem to be a failed drive. Thanks for all the help anyway
Thank you for the follow-up,