Crappy old computers and booting from CD

[Raven]

Hey all.
Trying to get my mates PC working, spent hours the other night pissing about with it and was wondering if anyone can give me some advice.

Basically the motherboard is about 5 years old, one of my cast offs. I had to create a boot disk to load CD drivers however my mate failed to inform me that his CD drive is knackered the PC can see it in the BIOS but not in DOS. I was wondering if I put my DVD drive in, is there any way i can load DVD drivers, or will the drive work as a standard CD drive in DOS? I was going to install win 98 and then upgrade it to XP as thats the way I used to do it but obviously without a working drive there isn't much I can do. The only place I can find that still sells plain old CD drives is Ebuyer, £3.00 or so which is nice until you see the P&P!

I keep telling him the best bet is to bin it and buy a new PC, even offered to order/build it for him but he is tighter than a ducks arse.

halp!

 

[Bob007]

XP can be started from floppy to and if the current drive giving you problems might want to switch it out for the installation.

Your DVD should be seen and useable. With either a DVD or CD in it.

XP home start up disc

First link is for pro.

 

[Yaka]

as bob says dvd drive should function no problems.

you know this is ideal for you to try either fedora live cd or ubuntu live cd

 

[Raven]

God, he only just copes with windows not going to scare him away from his PC for good

Thanks all, going round again with my DvD drive to give it a go.

 

[Raven]

well got it working had to install win 98 in the end, could only find one floppy disk

annoying thing is when I had finally got XP working and installed all the drivers etc he says, ok lets have a look at PCs then, decided he wants a new one after all

 

[phlash]

Nice

When he asks for help building the new toy, point him at these guys: PCSPECIALIST.CO.UK - Custom PCs, Custom Computers, Custom PC, Custom Built Computers, Gaming PC

I ended up using them after sending a pile of bits back to overclockers because something didn't work but I had no way of testing everything. The end cost was pretty much the same but it worked!