Forcing a PC to boot from the CD-Drive?

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KillerHERTZ

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My old Dell Dimension T600 will only boot from the Floppy, or HD.

In the BIOS there is an option to change it to the CD Drive, but when try to select the option, it appears to have been disabled???

Basically, I want to format the HD and do a clean install of XP from the CD.


Is there anyway I can do this? eg via a DOS command?


Thanks
 
KillerHERTZ said:
My old Dell Dimension T600 will only boot from the Floppy, or HD.

In the BIOS there is an option to change it to the CD Drive, but when try to select the option, it appears to have been disabled???

Basically, I want to format the HD and do a clean install of XP from the CD.


Is there anyway I can do this? eg via a DOS command?


Thanks

Hi mate,

How do you mean it appears to be disabled?

Some BIOS's can boot from CD, and some (very old ones) cant. I would think if you can set it in the BIOS, you'd be OK.

You won't be able to set it via a dos command, the BIOS will be the only way.

If you have trouble booting from the CD, you might be able to make a boot floppy for XP, and then boot from your floppy drive (which would then read your CD and do the install etc.) Have a look on here, this is for XP home, but should be a version for XP Professional too, depending on what version you have:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...68-6e4f-471c-b455-bd5afee126d8&displaylang=en

Good luck!!

:D
 
If you have a redundant floppy of Win98 startup disk you can use that to boot the computer and then format the HD. If you need one just let me know.
 
But how does he re-install XP when he's wiped the disk clean and can't boot from CD?

If you want a fresh installation of XP, simply pop the disk in whilst XP is running and choose re-install instead of upgrade.

This will clean the windows installation, but leave everything else in directories but not installed. Eg any apps will be on disk but not functional so you can just delete the folders.

thats the only way I can think of unless you can get a bootable CD up and running.

Craig
 
When you boot from the 95/98/dos start disk, it loads the generic ide cdrom drivers in config.sys and autoexec.bat to the point where you can execute the setup for windows xp from the directory on the cdrom.

No need to format the hard disk from dos first, as you can remove and recreate, then format the partition with NTFS or FAT32.

I'd never install over the top of another windows installation. Too much risk of something not being 100%, whereas a new install gives you the confidence that the only things there are what you wanted.
 
Last edited:
Cheers people, I sorted it now
 

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