At school, we have these old ibm computers we put took apart and put back together for learning. We also ordered some cd drives so we could put those in and install windows 98 on them. Problem is, the bios recognizes that we cdrom but I don't think it knows how to use it because the drivers are probably limited. I may be wrong, but this is my theory.
What happens is when you stick in a cd to boot off, the system simply does not turn on. It stays at a black screen. With all 30 of these computers, they did the same thing.

Now, I have heard of a program called Easy Bios or something, that allows you to stick a floppy in and boot into a "new" bios that will be able to pick and choose which device you want to boot off.. (for instance, a parallell port external cd rom).

I did some googling, however... Seems that EZ-BIOS is something that everyone wants to Uninstall and is for maxblast on maxtor hard drives. I'm confused whether EZ-BIOS is the utility I am lookng for.

If anyone knows where I can get such a tools as I described in my second paragraph, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

EZ-BIOS is not what you need to solve a CD-rom problem.
What it does is the following:
'Old' BIOSes can only see a limited capacity of a drive (32 Gb). So if you want to stick in a drive that is larger you need to replace the BIOS code that addresses locations on the drive with code that is able to address more locations. This is done by adding some code in the master boot record (MBR) of the hard disk. When the hard disk boots, instead of seeking a kernel to load, it first loads EZ-BIOS code that replaces the BIOS code. As of that moment the comp is capable of addressing large drives. The EZ-bios then proceeds with calling the kernel.
The reason people want to get rid of it is that Linux is capable of recognizing large drives without the help of the BIOS. In addition, since this is a non-standard way of handling the boot process, this gives a lot of trouble when you are trying to combine it with other ways of booting or accessing the drive in low-level ways. E.g. I once used it on a drive, and was not able anymore to access the drive with Partition Magic.

Even if the PC can not boot from a CDROM you should still see the POST messages displayed on the monitor.

Have you looked at the BIOS. Is the PC capable of booting from the CDROM?

Why don't you just flash the BIOS?

is it a ibm pc 300gl or something similar? their bios is quite broken if it comes to booting procedures.
can you post machine type and bios versions?

sl mritch.

I asked the teacher that also, but he said that the company was likely not to give out newer versions of the bios for this computer.. Which I disagree with. I'm not sure what the model number is, ill check that tomorrow.

We did get them working by using a windows 98 startup disk from bootdisk.com I realized that maybe these win98 discs aren't actually bootable, but that turned out to not be it since my BartPE CD wouldn't boot either.

Yea, they're are supposed to be able to. We set the first boot device to floppy, then CD-ROM, then Hard Disk 0

Pretty much, I'm just wondering if there is a program that will go on a floppy and let me boot off say a parallell port external drive (for instance, i want to boot bartpe on a machine that isn't capable of having a cd-rom.. ie my laptop) Anyone know of anything?