This makes no sense to me whatsoever, but here's the situation:

I have a Compaq nx6100 notebook that I've been using that had XP home, and I've used Knoppix 4.0.2 live for linux with this machine for some time. I've never actually installed any Linux distro to the hard drive on this machine.

Today I did a clean XP SP2 Pro install using a volume license edition. I deleted the partition and let XP install on all of the free space. The XP install finished, then I later popped in my Knoppix CD, rebooted ,and it bypassed the CD.

Next I went into the BIOS and noticed that multiboot had been disabled somehow since the XP install. This makes no sense to me. I re-enabled multiboot, made sure my CD drive was listed as the first boot device, saved my BIOS settings, restarted, and it bypassed the CD again. So I put in the XP setup disk, and it booted off of the CD fine. Next I tried a SuSe live disc, which I've used many times before, and it booted into Windows.

So, basically, now I can only boot off of a CD that is a Windows bootable CD. No linux boot CDs will work anymore. Like I said, this makes no sense to me, but nothing I've tried so far, including resetting the BIOS, has made any difference.

Is Windows somehow able to disable booting to non Windows discs all of a sudden, and I wasn't aware of it?

Wow!!

How about some other bootable CDs--eg the install disk for some Windows app, printer, etc.?

Much as we would **like** to catch MS in such a stupid move, I doubt that they are behind this.

It's a long shot, but you have nothing to lose by asking Compaq (HP)

I've tried several other Windows based boot discs, such as Bart PE, XP install, 2000 install, and all work fine.

I just upgraded the BIOS this morning and tried again, but it didn't make a difference.

The brute force way to trouble-shoot this is to "wipe" the disk, and start clean. The popular wipe utility is DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke). It is on Sourceforge.

But, I would like to hear HP/Compaq's answer to this....

As fun as it may be to contemplate a conspiracy, I suspect that a faulty Linux boot-CD is the real culprit. Try burning a new one.

As I mentioned in my original post, I tried more than one Linux bootable disc. I tried my SuSe live CD as well. Since then, I've tried the install CDs for SuSe 10 and Fedora Core 4, and none of them will boot. Every Linux boot disc is bypassed and XP starts, any Windows based boot discs work fine.

I think I'm going to end up wiping it, and re-install XP using the original system restore disc that came with the laptop. If that lets me get anywhere, I may just end up installing SuSe to the hard drive and dual booting between that and XP, but on this particular machine, I'd prefer to stay with XP on the HD and use Knoppix live for Linux.

I finally got this resolved, though it was wierd. I downloaded a BIOS update that was Windows based. After I flashed the BIOS and rebooted, all of a sudden XP said I had to reboot b/c XP installed a new device, but I hadn't changed a thing on the laptop other than updating the BIOS. I still couldn't boot any Linux discs.

What finally fixed it for me was downloading an HP network BIOS updater. This pushes a bios update to a client without it having to be run as an executable within Windows on the client. That finally did the trick, so now I can boot all of my Linux live discs again