[After BIOS update] Can't boot any Windows DVD setup disc but can boot other discs!?

Hi,

Please don't get scared with such a long text, I like to explain my problems in detail so I can help you help me, please continue to read if you think you might have any idea how to help me...

I have an LG laptop which is almost 4 years old and since I can't afford a new one, I can only upgrade and keep using this one. Vista runs fine but it's time to upgrade to Windows 7 and I was so excited when Seven was officially released that I decided to buy a new HDD for my laptop cause the old one is kinda small now...

The problem is that I never thought that my old laptop would have problems with HDDs larger than 137Gb and it has been a pain to make it recognize the 250Gb HDD I bought. The obvious first step was to find a BIOS update and LG support sucks, fortunately, there's a topic in this forum with a download to LG BIOS updates.

The BIOS upgrade process worked fine, but the new HDD was still recognized as a 137Gb drive. Searching a bit more and I found out that some laptops, somehow, before the BIOS upgrade, "locked" the HDD to only recognize 137Gb and I had to "unlock" it. For that, I found something called MHDD but every instruction said I needed to do this on a different computer and I had no means to do that. I just decided to do it locally on my laptop but it didn't work, the process failed. The drive is still reported as 137Gb HDD.

That was when I noticed something different when turning the laptop ON. It usually just said to press F2 to launch the BIOS setup. This time, it also said to press F11 to launch LG recover system or something like that. I thought some screen would just pop up and allow me to do things, but the laptop just went black for a few seconds and restarted. This time, the drive was reported as 250Gb and I thought that now I could go and install Windows 7, was I mistaken...

Basically, this is the story of what I managed to do, today. But since that "F11 pressing" (I believe it was after this), that I can't boot any Windows setup disc. When I try to boot a Windows Vista or Windows 7 setup disc I get the error CDBOOT: CDBOOT: Couldn't find BOOTMGR. When I try to boot a Windows XP setup disc I get the error CDBOOT: Memory overflow error. Also, and because my optical DVD drive is kinda screwed (but that's not the problem, just today I booted the Windows Vista disc many times before doing all this things) I had a USB Flash disk prepared to boot Windows 7 setup and before all this, I was able to boot it many times, but not anymore. I always had to plug the USB key, go into the BIOS, select it and move it to appear before the HDD, save settings and exit. But now, the USB key doesn't appear anymore in the BIOS.

Well, this only seems to be happening to Windows setup discs, here's a few boot discs I also tried and they all worked just fine:

• GParted Live CD
• Bart's PE (weird because it uses many of Windows XP boot disc files)
• LG BIOS Update DVD (I re flashed the BIOS just to make sure everything was ok)

Also, my current Windows Vista installation boots without any issues too...

So, what the hell is going on here... I can boot a few discs but I can't boot Windows setup discs? I read something on the web that may or may not be related but got me thinking that maybe the Windows setup discs are trying to write something on the HDD and are not able to, thus reporting the errors mentioned above. Where the discs I was able to boot, all (or so it seems) don't copy anything, they are just loaded into the memory. What to do you guys think? Anyway to fix this? What should I do?

Either way, Vista or Seven, I kinda need to do a clean install of Windows, this is running slow, but I can't find a way to do that unless I can boot any Windows setup disc. Is there a way I could boot some Live CD that loads itself to memory (if that's really the problem) and then allows me to replace the DVD disc on the optical drive and run "setup.exe"? Maybe with a process like this I succeed in installing Windows 7...

Thanks for reaching the end of my testament