I was recently given a Dell Latitude CPt which is an old m/c made for Win98 or Me. I suspect that someone has unsuccessfully tried to upgrade the OS from 98 to ME. It tries to boot Windows 2000 Professional, shows a Windows 2000 setup window, but after some time it gets a fatal error and starts the boot process again.

So I'm trying to reload 98SE from CD....but!! the PC won't boot from the CD drive despite me changing the boot order in the BIOS, in fact I've even tried disabling the hard disk in order to force it to boot from CD. The CD spins a bit but it won't boot, says 'no bootable device press F1 to retry or F2 for setup...'etc.

Why won't it boot from the CD?? I have borrowed another CD drive and get the same results so I don't think it's a hardware problem. The Win 98SE CD i'm using works on other m/cs so it's not a faulty CD... anyhow I've also tried a Windows XP CD and get the same result.
Could the m/c be hard coded to boot from the hard disk only??
Can someone help please??
Norman

have you check the cd drive cable. maybe power is connected bit not the data cable, or it could be bad. Also are you certain that the CD is bootable., when you say it works on another pc do you mean that is boots up from the cd drive.

Thanks for your suggestion - you are right. I tried various CDs in my other Pcs and they are NOT bootable!!! They contain Windows distributions but are not bootable. Your other suggestion re. the hardware is unlikely. The CD drive just slides into place and there is only 1 connector block, anyhow I have been given a spare 1 to try, although I can't prove that either is working, but they do spin up.

So can I create a boot CD on another PC or what other option do I have??