Dear Linux users,

I recently bought, from Harvey Norman, for around $390, an Acer Aspire XC-603 desktop computer. It was pre-installed with "Windows 8.1 with Bing".

I was going to repartition the hard disk drive in order to make the computer a dual boot Linux/Windows computer.

To do this, of course, I needed to boot off the Linux DVD (or Gparted).

However, I was not able to force the computer to boot off the DVD drive.

In the past it was possible to do this by pressing either Esc key or the F2 key during the boot-up process. However, nothing I did during the boot-up of this computer prevented the computer from booting Windows 8.1 off the hard drive.

Can anyone tell me if it is possible to boot off the DVD and, if so, how to do it?

Thanks in anticipation,

James Sinnamon