I find this site and hope you will help — I am definitely not an IT pro.
My son’s Inspiron 2500 had some kind of problem (he is a complete technophobe so I have no details), and he reformatted his hard drive. It is now blank (partitioned and formatted successfully) — so NO Op sys installed.
He tried to install a brand new Win XP and could not boot the new CD.
At power up, no matter what the BOOT order, the inspiron will NOT boot from the CD drive.
I am tried several known working bootable CDS.
Here is what I have done:
I looked at BIOS setup and saw that the Removable Media (diskette drive) is listed okay with a Plus (+) sign, as is the hard drive, but the CD-Rom drive is listed, but has an Exclamation Point (!) by it when you select it.
I change the Boot order to CD Rom first and nothing.
I booted up with a Win 98 startup diskette, selected CD-Rom support and I CAN GO TO THE CD ROM (DRIVE E:) AND DO A ‘DIR’ AND SEE THE CONTENTS OKAY. BUT IT WILL NOT BOOT UP FROM THE CD DRIVE.
Dell Notebook support would not help me due to my son’s reseller having voided the warranty.
Can somebody help me??
I will be forever grateful.