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.