I'm trying to install windows xp on an old dell. He has no working cd rom, no floppy, no USB drivers. I reformatted a separate HDD to install windows on, but no drivers on that HDD when put in the primary drive position, so nothing will work. The hard drive that has the problem, will only run for a few min. before displaying the blue screen of death. And it says no available partition when trying to over write thew OS that's on there, OR, it won't let it over write it because it's in use. How do I go about solving this problem? No working partition on the old hard drive, no drivers on the new hard drive, no working cd rom......I"M PULLING MY HAIR OUT!! LOL!

Then you need to try pxe. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

There is nothing special about dell cd roms......and a working used cd rom can be picked up for next to nothing and installed in minutes. Put a cdrom drive in...insert the xp cd and reboot. Xp will either load or tell you the hd is toast. Be sure to go into setup and have the cdrom as one of the first boot devises and the hd as last

A new CD burner can be bought for about $25 shipped with readers even less. Look at newegg.com for hardware.