Create bootable CD-rom

Question

I have a Dimension e510. It did not come with OS disks, and it does not have a floppy drive. I want to change it from Windows Media Center Edition to XP Pro; as near as I can tell, this means I have to format the hard drive and install XP from scratch. (Aside -- the reason I'm doing this is that a program [game] I want to run is not supported on MCE and does not work on it. I do not care how many people tell me it should work, it does not and is not supported.) As near as I can tell after that, I need to boot to a different disk so I can do things to the hard disk. To repeat, I do not have a floppy. I have USB flash drives, a USB hard drive, and the CD drive. I figure the easiest thing to do might be to create a bootable CD, seems like a good thing to have anyway. But I can't find instructions for it. The instructions on the web all say to start with a bootable floppy. The instructions that come in the Roxio I have say to navigate to a bootable image, and I do not know how to find or create one of those. Can someone here please help me with that step? Secondarily, if you have any reasonable comments on my overall problem, I'd appreciate those as well. rc

osprey4 · Answer

The Windows XP disc is a bootable CD, so you don't need anything else. You can boot to the CD-ROM by hitting F12 on boot and selecting that option.

fireberd · Answer

Are you absolutely sure that the program will not run under MCE?  All MCE is, is XP Pro with some added media options.  If it runs under XP Home and/or Pro it should run under MCE.    We went through this with another poster a couple of months ago.  The requirements for the program may have never been revised to include MCE.  When XP came out all there were only XP Home and XP Pro.  MCE came out several years later and is only available with a new PC, it's not available as a user installed 'upgrade'.  If the software vendor never updated the published specs, it may only state XP Home and Pro.

ralphcook · Answer

As I said in the original post -- it does not work. Perhaps the vendor did not wante to do testing on yet another operating system.

I keep seeing this "MCE is Just XP Pro With Some Media Options" -- no one can tell me what they are, or why, if this is the case, M$ generated another entire operating system for the purpose of releasing them. If they are REALLY that minor, why aren't they just part of XP Pro?

rc

osprey4 · Answer

Go into the BIOS and set up your CD drive as the only boot device. If you have two drives, you need to boot from the master, usually the top drive.

Storage, Drives & Media

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