Yesterday I was working on Lucie's laptop - I made a rescue CD to use to restore her computer if something should go wrong. I figured I better test it while things were working to be sure all was in order before I needed it. So I put it in and rebooted the computer. The laptop SHOULD have read the CD and booted up from that into recovery mode. Nope - skipped right on past and booted up like normal. Which is not what I wanted. So I tried again. Nope - goes right on past it. So I checked the usual settings and the laptop was set up properly to read the CD before the hard drive in the boot up sequence, etc. etc. I took the CD and tried it in another laptop - worked fine. I re-made it anyway. No better. I put in a music CD and it played just fine. Hmmm. Now I am getting a bit concerned. So I updated the BIOS and drivers and this and that. Uninstalled and re-installed the CD drive. Nothing. I went onto the forums and did some research and posted my dilemma. Others who had the same problem wound up sending in their computers for motherboard replacement. I wound up calling the manufacturer and had to go through the usual checklist that the rep has to go through. Bear in mind that each time I try something new, I have to re-boot the computer and wait for it to get fully operational - which takes a lot of time. During that whole troubleshooting process, I took a look at the disk and another one I was trying. Remember - I had tried them with success in another laptop so I was sure they worked. But they were a bit smudged so I rinsed them off and on a whim, I took a quick swipe of the CD drive reader lens and blew out some dust. Wouldn't you know that fixed it?! Only took 5 hours of my time to try the basic, 3 second fix... Then I went back to the forums and made my post of shame. Maybe it will help someone else.
