I have recently been attacked by a bunch of viruses and am having trouble removing them. I want to run WinXP disk and refresh the entire system but my DVD-CDRW drive does not boot my WinXP disk nor any disk with an autorun feature and only recongnizes the disk drive in safe mode. The disk drive is set to cd-rom in the boot sequence but the disk does not boot, would this be a problem with the disk drive? or a virus attacking the drive? any help on fixing this would be appreciated.

You have to watch the screen & "press any key" when prompted, otherwise the system will bypass the CD/DVD drive & skip to the HDD. BTW, bootable & autorun are different things

Press Ctrl F11 at the same time (ONE time) after the POST. That will allow you to install from the Recovery Partition. Or, F12 after POST to boot from the CD. Then, you'd press any key to boot from the CD. Life's more painless for the brainless.

I do not get a message telling me to press any key. The cd-rom begins to run, i can hear it, it runs for about 10 seconds then shuts off and the normal windows starts up. I know it sounds like a disk problem but disks that used to auto run at startup also are doing the same thing so I think there is a connection to the problem. I also tried running from the partition and it just started the normal windows as normal.

You need to press the keys after POST, but before that screen goes away. Watch the screen carefully. Life's more painless for the brainless.

Cant you just run the disk from inside windows, and choose to re-install? Anyhow i'm no expert but I dont think doing that will clear viruses, you want a prog like AVG scanner 7.5, free versions here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_a... Just download, update, select 'scanner', then settings, then 'recommend actions' then 'quarantine'. Then 'scanner' again, then scan, then complete system scan. I know cos i've just had to do all this. Ta!

http://support.dell.com/support/top... Hope that long url works...... If your Dell shipped after June 15, 2004, and if the mbr has never been overwritten, then you should have the PC Restore By Symantec available to you. It's on a hidden partition. The url above (if I put the link here correctly) will help you out on that if you want to do the restore. Make sure you have everything backed up, as everything will be wiped and restored to the exact same as when it shipped to you from Dell.