My wife’s school Dell laptop ate its hard drive after 15 months. I have installed a new hard drive and have a set of “bootable” CDs that contain the Education Authorities mirror of the OS (XP Pro) and all their programs for this model. I follow the instructions supplied but the Dell keeps saying that it can’t find a boot sector on the hard drive and no other bootable devices, even though I have directed it to boot from the CD ROM.
If I create a set of bootable floppies from the Microsoft website and boot from them will I still be able to load the OS from the mirror discs?
PS I hate Dell but it was free.
Dave.