USB Dvd drive doesn't boot on formatted HD

[ehc681]

Hello and thanks for viewing! My I/O Magic external USB DVD drive will not boot on my recently formatted home built PC. Ok, so here's what I've done so far. My PC originally had WinXP so I used an old floppy drive and ran an old windows 98 boot disk then I ran FDISK and set the C: partition as active. Next, I typed in Format C: and reformatted. So now I'm trying to install a retail copy of the Windows 7 DVD. BIOS recognizes the drive and I have the boot order set to boot the optical drive first then HD but when it boots up. I get a message saying "CDBOOT: Unable to boot from CD." I have had similar issues like this before and was able to resolve the errors, but I have never tried to boot from a USB drive or boot from a DVD. Do I need USB drivers even though BIOS recognizes the device? Or maybe DVD drivers rather than generic CD ROM drivers?? If so, what kind and how do I install them?

 

[atomichybrid]

If youre 100% sure that the USB DVD drive is recognised in the BIOS, and that all optical drives are in priority over the hard drive then its possible that the Windows disk is not bootable which is strange.

 

[setishock]

I know this doesn't help but it doesn't make sense to me that you didn't install a dvd drive in to the main board instead of using an external dvd drive. If you can temp install a drive to the mother board then get windows installed, it would be a lot simpler.