It may have something to do with the inaccuracy of the older read heads on those CD drives. As for not being able to boot to CD, there was a point where the architecture changed within the PC. I recall in my first Pentium, the CD drive IDE cable plugged directly into the sound card. After most of the parts had been replaced in that PC I had plugged the replacement CD into the mobo and the drive worked better, however it still needed a boot floppy.

Brian Kelsay

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Leo Mauler webgiant@yahoo.com 12/03/04 12:45AM >>>

--- Brian Kelsay Brian.Kelsay@kcc.usda.gov wrote:

Correct. And some old CD-ROM drives won't boot to CD. YMMV. You can still do a boot from floppy and hand off to CD.

True enough. In the laptops I've tried which didn't boot from CD, miniCDs continued not to work even when booting from floppy first.