Do many CD/DVD drives fail to support boot these days?

[gbhall]

Not my problem, but one I have noticed many, many times lately on these pages. So many people report 'unable to boot from install CD' or DVD, despite having the boot order correct. Can some experienced repair technician throw light on what is going on - are CD/DVD devices becoming quite quickly unable to support booting?

And what may be the cause? Is there some change in recent motherboards, is XP/Vista/Win7 sending out updates which interfere with motherboard drivers? Do devices simply fail quite quicky these days? .... or what?

 

[kimsland]

No

Here's what the issues have been:

Written disc (copied) that is not being picked up by the standard laptop CD/DVD Drive (normal I find)
Faulty CD/DVD Drive, that can read in Windows, but cannot boot BootCDs (common I find)
Users not selecting either "press any key to boot from CD" or not selecting the Fn key that changes to CD boot (not exactly Bios config)
Scratched or dirty discs (and CD/DVD Drives)
Incorrect jumper setting (or cabling) on older ATA (IDE Connected) CD/DVD Drives
There may be a whole range of others (and a comprehensive list) listed on other sites of possible issues

BUT: When the computer was bought (brand new) it booted from the CD/DVD Drive (even new and old computers)
Therefore something (as above) has changed since, ie its not MS updates or firmware drivers, or anything like that. Although I agree that parts don't last as long as they did in the past, ie most 486 computers still work, ironically