CD Drive Not Working - Need options to reformat hard drive

[medabomb2000]

I have received a computer for a friend that I am trying to reformat and reinstall the XP OS back onto. It is a Dell Inspiron 6000. I have inserted the OS disk, but the cd drive is not pulling anything up (I have boot seq for CD first on the BIOS). I was trying to think of a different way to maybe install the OS not using the disk. Would a Jump Drive be able to do the job? If so how would I go about going that route?

I am pretty sure that the current cd drive is not working as the owner of the computer has stated it has not read music in the last 3 months from CD's or anything else that has been inserted. Again, just trying to find a way around the problem as the user has stated they don't use the CD drive at all and no need to replace it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jikifreak]

You can try having the OS on a jump drive an make sure to enable USB in your bios and set it as first boot priority.

 

[medabomb2000]

I just tried that a sec ago, but it came up with an error stating that the device was not bootable. Is there a way to make a boot file for the OS on usb? I copied the exact disk onto the drive.

 

[foothead]

Use Gparted and add a boot flag to it.
Also, was it NTFS?
Most flash drives are some sort of FAT, which Windows isn't designed to boot off of (i dont think)
Use Gparted for that too.

EDIT: Of course, you could 'borrow' the optical drive from a different computer