No bootable devices on Dell laptop

[gemstone]

I am trying to do a clean reinstall of winXP on my Dell laptop. Bios is set to boot to CD drive but it says "No bootable devices". If I use a startup disk to boot to Dos and switch to the CD drive letter, it can read the contents of the CD but when I type setup.exe, it says "This program cannot run in dos mode". I tried using another copy of XP and same thing happens. These are full version XP CDs, not update XP CDs. It originally had ME on it but I bought it used with Win XP on it. so there must be able to install it by booting to CD. Any ideas?.

Thanks, Paul

 

[anglo]

When you boot up with the boot disk, you see the contents of the CD. To run setup from DOS, you must change directories to the i386 directory.

Next, type the following

winnt

See what happens!

 

[gemstone]

Thanks, I will try it.