I didn't know that. You may have saved my bacon. Thank you sooooo much!

You just had to mention bacon and I've yet eaten breakfast yet. lol

Hope it works Erisian. Not sure why boot from CD was disabled or changed for your system in the first place.

My built in CD drive is dead and I couldn't find out how to fix it so I bought an external (USB) CD drive. TTBOMK it has never been bootable. I've just finished backing up my files ready (Gawd it's a slow drive. Reinstalling Windows is going to be tedious!!!) I'm taking a breather from it all for now. I'll let you know if it's successful. BTW I've been told a couple of times that the built in CD drive can just be pulled out but I get too much resistance when I try it and I'm scared of breaking it. If it helps, it's a Dell Optiplex GX260 with Super Writemaster CD drive. I would love to get it fixed.

You have to loosen the screws (if installed right on both sides) to remove the CD drive. If you have a Dell Clamshell, then all you have to do is squeeze the tabs (inside) on either side of the CD Drive. Still no way to remove the CD Drive without opening up the PC.

That's the problem. I can't see any screws - it looks like a sealed unit.

I have a Dell but as Lyles says, there are many models and they don't all have the same opening. try this.

try googling "service manual Dell MODEL#" with your particular model

Thanks Molly that's really useful.

Lyle - My bios doesn't recognize my external CD drive at all.

If you have the ability to boot from USB, it should see your CDR as a USB drive, so, try that Erisian.

I have BIOS v. A09 which is USB bootable but unless a flash drive is plugged in all it shows is:

1. IDE CD-ROM Device
2. Diskette Drive
3. Hard-Disk Drive C:

all enabled. 1. only refers to the inbuilt CD-ROM drive and the external drive is not recognized as a USB device.

This may sound like an odd thing to do, but disconnect your CD ROM from you PC but connect your USB CDRom in. When you power up, see what options your BIOS sees then Erisian.

I uninstalled the CD ROM but can't physically disconnect it because I can't get into it. The BIOS showed exactly the same but still no boot from the USB drive. The CD ROM drive reinstalled itself when Windows loaded.

Can you give more info on this please. I don't know what to google.

EDIT: Don't worry, I found this: http://www.techtipsgeek.com/install-windows-from-usb-flash-pen-drive/559/

In case you still need them:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994

They are listed toward the bottom of the page.

The floppy method is old. lol

Never had to do this with client PCs at my last job, but did this for other PCs often enough in the ol' Win98 days. Does this still work for XP? lol

Not sure if this will work with your USB CDRom drive though. If you can create a the equivalent on a pen drive then I guess that will be your only way to get XP back Erisian. Sad that you don't have access to a functional internal CDRom drive. Still, don't forget to patch your XP from SP3 and up. The patching is the most time consuming of them all. If you can download SP3 on a spare pen drive, I would suggest you do this ahead of time. If your CD installer is SP1 or SP2, you can directly go to SP3 (don't need SP2 to go to SP3 but you will need SP1 or SP2 if your installer disk has no service pack at all).

Cheers Lyle. I've still yet to reinstall Win but I'm test driving Lubuntu and I think I'm falling in love. Don't like the default browser and I'm trying to download Firefox but having difficulties. Will get back to you when I'm sorted.

Bilbo - thank you again. I'll try USB first but I'll bear that in mind.

The USB method was useless so I'm trying the setup disks that bilbo directed me to. Lubuntu crashed badly and I'm giving up on Linux on this machine.

Erisian why don't you try Mint Linux.
Gerard.

Tell me more.

Thank you. I can't see how this would work any better than the others on my machine though. The problem I have is that modern operating systems cause problems for me but older ones don't allow my mobile broadband.