well after putting smart boot manager on a floppy i was able to boot into knoppix. When it was booting it said "You passed an undefined mode number" i don't know what that means but knoppix loaded up fine. This experience has me asking some more questions however.

1. Why did smart boot manager have no problem booting the cd but the computer couldn't?
2. Obviously the computer and run linux but what does the hassle in booting translate to if it were to be installed to the hard drive? Would it be ok because it isn't loading from cd?
3. Still curious of Dell and if these is a way to discourage people from linux. lol.

Carrying on with my idea that the BIOS is set up to ignore non MS partitions, at least on CD:

By booting with a floppy, the floppy then "takes over" and launches knoppix. At this stage the BIOS is out of the picture.

There might be a BIOS update which fixes this, you'll have to check on the Dell website for the specific model of PC you have.

The only way you can be sure about whether Linux will boot from hard disc is, I think, by actually trying it. What you might be able to do is temporarily install your working hard disc into the Dell and starting a boot. As soon as it seems to have started to boot, switch off before Linux gets confused about finding new hardware. Assuming that you have a boot menu, you can kill the system at this point, it shouldn't do any harm to your Linux installation.

Please note that this is an "intelligent guess" and I have no hard evidence or experience.

Incidentally, this is why I do not buy branded PCs. White boxes are the way to go. That way you get full compatibility.

Looks like you don't have a bootable CD - the BIOS will keep looking until it finds a valid boot record, or give up if no device has one.
I seem to recall a thread recently where an image burnt to CDRW failed to boot, but the same image burnt to a CD/R was fine. Maybe try a different media - and burn it at the lowest rate you can. I (still) use 4X to make sure I don't have issues - a habit from the early days of buffer over/under-run errors.

it works fine on my box tho - i don't need the floppy. You could be right i don't know tho. You say the BIOS will keep looking until it finds a valid boot record. So the bios isn't finding but the bios on my box can find it so i think it is the bios. i'll have to look into it to see if others have had problems.

Smart Boot Manager will, most times, persuade a reluctant box to boot from CDROM.

Oops. Must remember to refresh the page before posting...