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I am trying to reformat my desktop and have been following the instructions in the owners manual that came with it,

i have inserted the operating system cd (windows XP)

i then shut it down and restart

i press F12 for the boot menu

i select IDE CD rom device (option 5)

then instead of booting from the drive it starts up normaly

is there any other way to reformat my drive? All the advice i can find on the internet seems just to repeat the instructions in my manual

Thanks

Eric

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Even if there was another way to reformat the drive, you'll still need to boot to the CD to install your operating system. Does the disk drive function correctly while you are booted into your current operating system?

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Does your Dell have 2 optical drives (CD-RW & DVD-Rom)? If so place the CD in the DVD drive due to it being the master optical drive. Also you may need to use the F2 option to access the Bios and change the boot order to CD-Rom as the first boot device. Dell sets it to boot from the HDD first to save boot time.

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