Another "No boot device available, Press Enter to continue" thread.

[animepadweb]

I've changed the boot order under options, made the CD drive the IDE 0:0, made an ISO with disk utility, made an ISO with ImageTool, used 4 Windows XP cds here at the office to do this with, and none of them will boot, and neither will their ISOs....However...

any other operating system boot disc will boot.

Linux, FreeBSD, etc...all boot fine...but not windows CD's or these ISOs...

Works fine on my 13" Macbook...

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Macbook Pro 17"
2.16ghz, 2gb ddr2sdram, 80gb hd, osx10.4.7

 

[ajay]

I'll only state the obvious here. Are your Windows CD's bootable? I had a similar problem until I went to a known good bootable WinXP cd. No more problem.

 

[animepadweb]

Yes, they are bootable. They're used in production on over 2000 campus lab and student machines...

I finally got one to work....Here's what I found out...

Parallels will only boot Windows CD's with a certain partitioning scheme for the el-torito support...I tried 7 Discs...all of which are bootable (on any other machine)...The one that finally worked had a different partitioning scheme than all the others. Hope this helps other people who might be stuck in the same situation...

You can tell by when you put a certain ISO in the drive and open disk utility. If the CD shows 2 entries, it might not work. If it shows 3, then it will. One is the Physical Disc, the Other is the boot sector on the disc, and the other is the rest of the disc...

I'll research more of this later and document it here once XP is installed ;p I'm leaving the office right now though...

 

[pigwin32]

I was having the same problem but set the device to be /dev/scd0 rather than the mount point /media/cdrom. This fixed the problem and I was able to boot directly from the Windows XP cd. I guess this may have been discussed previously but I figure it might be useful info for someone else who reads this thread.

This was on top of attaching the CD/DVD-ROM Drive to IDE 0:0.

Sorry, forgot to point out that I'm actually running on Ubuntu rather than osx. I think on my AlBook the cd device is actually /dev/disk1s0 but I've no idea if that is correct for the Intel Macs. You could check in system profiler.