Are Dell's really as brain dead as they appear to be?

[Funkstar]

I have my brothers Dell here for a re-install.

Not long after he got it I replaced the CD-ROM with a DVD-RW I had lying around. Now, although the drive works in XP (before XP died through virus/Trojan infection) for some reason the Dell BIOS says there isn't a CD-ROM installed.

Does this crappy system really not want to use a DVD-RW as a CD boot device? How lame is that?!?!?

I'm currently using another system to do the copy stage of setting up XP from the CD and set the boot record. Then I'll move the drive back to the hunk-of-junk and boot so XP can configure itself. Sound sensible?

I couldn't think of any other way to get XP installed on it.

[Aden]

Sounds sensible, but do dells not have updates to their bios.. and anyway what the heck.. DVD's have been around forever.. how old is this dell?

[mehmeh]

External USB Optical drive? would save you alot of messing around in future assuming. Gawd knows why it doesnt just work though. Can't be that old if your giving it XP, my wild guess would be funky Dell BIOS, maybe Firmware in the original CD drive. Have you tried any other drives?

[Funkstar]

This is not my night.

the PC I was doing the part install of XP has now lost its boot manager even though the boot drive was un-plugged.

The Dell now can't seen any optical drive right now.

And every time I try and copy XP SP3 from my network onto my USB stick, it dissapears from Explorer.

Perhaps I should just go to bed already.

[Aden]

This is not my night.

the PC I was doing the part install of XP has now lost its boot manager even though the boot drive was un-plugged.

The Dell now can't seen any optical drive right now.

And every time I try and copy XP SP3 from my network onto my USB stick, it dissapears from Explorer.

Perhaps I should just go to bed already.

Thats wierd.. but everyone has wierd days.. you should go and sleep

Wake up early and kick that dell really hard before installing XP successfully.

[Jay]

it sounds like a mix of user error and bad hardware.

[synaesthesia]

Which Dell is it, specifically?