boot a win xp cd from an ext dvd drive

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Hi i am trying to boot my xp pro installation cd from my usb dvd drive but it doesnt seem to boot the cd at all from dos. i went into bios and set all the boot device to search and boot any bootable cd from my ext dvd drive.

any suggestions? thanks

[Digerati]

How old is your machine? Chances are it doesn't support USB booting and so the BIOS may need flashupgrade

[directhex]

what does "it doesnt seem to boot the cd at all from dos" mean?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Sorry, I am trying to boot a win xp pro cd from an external dvd drive. The pc is over 6 years old and is dying slowly. it did have two cd drives but none of them work now so i am forced to use a ext dvd drive.

if it doesnt support usb booting than how come i can select "boot from usb cd drive" from bios?

[directhex]

usb booting is something of a dark art

depending on the cd, you might try setting it to usb floppy or usb zip drive

[ash_rm]

If your unable to boot from DVD another option is to create a small fat32 partition on the HDD and copy the windows files to it using a boot disk (floppy - assuming it has one) with USB driver.

Then run windows setup from that partition.