I think your a bit of a lost cause! If you don't know what your doing don't do it.:mad: Look at your manual it will tell your how to restore your dell. You must use only the disks that came with your machine. no others:mad:

That does apply to most manufacturer-supplied (OEM) disks, as those disks are specific to the model of machine they are shipped with. However, any fully-fledged Windows installation disk can obviously be used.

wjrinck,

I'm surprised that your wife's install disk didn't even find a drive to install on; that isn't the problem one usually encounters when using an OEM disk on another machine. Given that you've received two different disk-related errors when trying two different installation methods, I would:

* Double/triple check the physical installaiton of the drive; just because the BIOS can read the disk info from the drive's firmware does not mean that the drive is functioning (or installed) entirely correctly.

* Borrow a retail version of a Windows XP or 2000 install disk from someone, try it, and see if you encounter errors with that. If so, something isn't right hardware-wise.

If your floppy drive is having problems I would think that could cause it. I had a floppy drive go out once, in fact it would go in and out. Turned out it was my power supply. You would think if a power supply goes out that nothing would work but that is not the case. In fact the bad power supply affected my cdrom drive and my floppy but the rest of my pc was fine until the day my pc wouldn't come on. I new then my power supply was bad so replaced it.
WALLA ! cdrom and floppy working fine again.

One more suggestion. I noticed recently that Windows was not detecting my CD drive, despite it being detected perfectly in the BIOS. I was stumped here. I then tried to boot off of a CD using this drive, but failed. I then again checked the BIOS, it was being detected. On an impulse, I switched data cables and voila! Everything was back to normal. I suggest you also try swapping your data cable with a new one.

I picked up an IBM Thinkpad I Series at an auction sale, I installed a new hd since it didn't have one and am trying to install 2000 professional but all I get when I install the disk and restart is "install diskette and press enter key to reboot". What am I doing wrong??

The order in which your computer looks for bootable media (Floppy disk, CD-ROM, Hard Drive) might need to be adjusted so that the machine boots from the CD drive first.

Here are the instructions for that procedure from IBM/Lenovo's support site; the steps might be slightly different for your particular model of Thinkpad, but they should be at least close enough that you'll b able to figure it out:

1. Power off the ThinkPad, if it is turned on.
2. Power on the ThinkPad.
3. Press the F1 key to enter the BIOS Setup Utility when the ThinkPad logo is seen on the
screen.
4. Choose Startup from the menu
5. Choose Boot from the menu (*).
6. In Boot Priority Order, set ATAPI CD0 to the top of the list, 1.
7. Press F10 to save the new setup.
(Insert the Win 2000 install CD at this point)
9. Restart the system; it should now detect the CD and attempt to boot from it

>>>>Made the six boot disks
what operating system were the boot disk made for?
windows 2000 with only boot a windows 2000 instalation.
>>>>Disk I/O" error message after running first disk.
this mean the floppy is damage, you woild have to make that one over.
>>>>no bootable devices found" message.
you have to set the bios to first boot from the cd drive.
However, if this disk is not bootable, you would ahve to get a bootable cd to run the installation, in the same breath, you can make the bootable floppy and use a non bootable xp cd.
>>>>>>Shouldn't I just be able to install XP from my wife's disk?
if the disk is a restore cd the disk may be made specific to your wife pc, However, if this cd is a full version of XP it should work

Hey bobbyraw,

Just FYI: the post you quoted and responded to was posted 1 1/2 years ago; it's doubtful that that particular member (who is a different member than the latest poster) is still waiting around for an answer

that's right!!! The poster who had the problems probably has a new pc now- LOL!!!