CD drive isn't being read

[Evan]

I am trying to reinstall windows xp to fix a major virus/spyware problem on my daughter's computer.

The system will not boot from cd.

I have tried the disk in another system, and it works fine.
I have tried three different cd drives, no change.
I have swapped the ide cable with a brand new one, no change.
I have swapped ide ports on the mobo, no change.
The drive does appear in the BIOS, and I have set the cd as the primary boot drive.
I have even disabled the other boot drives. (All this gets me is a system beep and a message to press F1 to try booting again.)
The drive does not spin at boot, but it spins endlessly when I try to look at it using windows explorer.

This is an older Dell system with a P4 1G chip on what appears to be a Dell mobo.

What next?

 

[Gbrooksgeorge]

The CD you are trying to read, is it a CD - R/W or a CD-R. I have found that CD-R/W will not work on older CD readers. I had the same problem and re-created the software on a CD-R andit worked just fine.

 

[Evan]

I believe that the media is CD-R. It is a licensed copy from my company's IT department.

 

[Justin]

Get the CD drive from a machine that you have verified will read the CD, and try that. If that fails to work, you are out of luck - Try a boot manager. My personal favorite is SBM (Smart Boot Manager, located at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net ). Install that to a floppy, boot from it, then instruct it to boot from CD. That may help you.

 

[Samstoned]

ya sounds like older cd drive will not read the burnt copy I have had that issue when using the wrong burning config setup
should get yerself a 52X or n'other cdrw would be better
if you can burn a new copy change burn config to iso bootable
iso level 1 no multisession