My friend gave me his old computer that used to have WinXP on it. I'm trying to load Win7 on it and I thought there was something wrong because it wouldn't boot off a bootable disc, even though I setup the BIOS boot settings properly (I've done this sort of thing a million times).

However, this closely related post helped me realize that I can boot off a bootable CD (WinXP), just not a DVD (Win7)

Computer won’t boot from CD/DVD drive

That might be the answer to my question, however, this motherboard is still pretty current technology. It's a good quality Gigabyte board, and judging from this product page, it came out in 2004.

If I can't figure out a solution to my DVD boot problem, I'll have to try something like this:

Boot and Install Windows from a USB thumb drive

I guess it's possible that this motherboard doesn't allow booting from a DVD, but I still think that I might be missing something. It wouldn't be the DVD rom drive would it? I did try another drive and had the same results. However, I didn't try booting a DVD in the computer that the other test drive came out of, I'll do that later today.

Any other advice? Thanks.