Solved! Laptop won't boot from external CD Drive

[Jrb599]

My dell Inspiron has a bad hard drive and CD Drive. I have an external drive I'm trying to boot Windows XP from to install on the new hard drive. But it won't boot. Any advice?

Thx.

 

[buwish]

Try going into the BIOS and selecting USB device in the boot order menu to see if that gets it going for you.

 

[Jrb599]

I should add I've done that and that didn't work. I also have updated the bios to A09, the latest version.

 

[dextermat]

try pressing on f8 or f11 when the computer boot:

a menu should pop up and ask on witch device you wanna boot.

If it still doesn't work you might have a bad CD / DVD disk

 

[Jrb599]

Got it. I had to take out the internal DVD Drive. Plug in the external. And tell it to boot from the internal drive.