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Hi all i have a dell Cpi D300XT which had a Bios password activated through a few post i was able to short out the eeprom chip and hey presto.

However i cannot get the machine to boot from the CD Rom to re-install Windows XP i have seen the other posts about making a bootable drive however this machine does not have a floppy drive.

I was therefore wondering if there is away to get this machine to boot from say a USB pen drive i can see anything in the BIOS set so any help would be appreciated

There is no boot device options in the bios?

does it have a cd drive? then you should look for boot order in the bios as Tmagic said.
I don't think you will manage to boot from usb with this old dell because the old bios doesn't support usb boot and even if it would it is usb1.0 and would take ages to install from...

I have tried this and changed

1st Boot device to CD/Rom
2nd Boot device to CD/Rom
3rd Boot Device to Cd/rom

Still it will not boot from an orginal XP CD I have seen something about adding a sercice tag but i'm not sure how to addd this to the hard drive or do i need to add it to the eeprom chip

the service tag doesn't have anything to do with installing the operating system.
stupid question but are you sure the install cd is bootable? maybe it is a copied cd and not bootable!?
or did you try any other bootable cd, like bartpe, ultimate boot cd or gparted or whatever? just to make sure the optical device is ok...
ok, else you can try to hit f12 during the dell post screen. I can't remember for the older dell laptops but it should bring you to the one time boot menu where you can choose the drive to boot from.

thats my two cents

I will think about it....
regards, mscrx