What happens when you try to boot from the CD? Do you get an error or is just not an option?

Did you try pressing F12 at boot time and selecting the CD?

Peter

Thanks for the reply. Yes I hit F12 and get the CD as an option. When I select that option, the green light on the drive lights up (as if it wants to do it) but then gives up and tries to boot from the hard drive. Before I up the hard drive, it would continue on that route after attempting (and failing) to boot to the cd. The drive was working perfectly before I did this, so I find it hard to believe that suddenly I would a hardware failure at the same time.

I've selected the CD as the primary boot device in the BIOS as well and it seems to attempt it, but poops out and reverts to the hard drive.

thanks again

Message Edited by nyctravis on 11-06-2006 06:14 PM

Can you read from the CD drive on the D3000? If not, you might check the cables.

If the drive is going to fail, it will fail sometime and maybe yours just happened to fail right after installing Windows.

Peter

Have you tried another disc just in case the disc went bad? Try booting the disc in another machine (if you have one) to make sure it is good.

Can you read the CD?

Peter

Thanks-I have an external USB floppy and made some boot disks from bootdisk.com but i can't seem to select the external floppy as a bootup option from the F12 menu.

I don't think it can read, but am not sure as I can't get the computer to start up. I guess maybe I will have to just buy a new drive. I hope I can find that is compatible. I just need to get one that fits the bay and is IDE? Is there anything else I need to know to ensure that it's compatible? This is so frustrating!

Thanks again for the help. Yes I've put the cd in 2 of my other dell computers (both are laptops) and it works fine there. That's how I copied the cd to an external hard drive to try to install it on the desktop that I'm having the problem with.

Unfortunately, the other 2 pc's are laptops so I can't use them on the desktop. The drive won't boot up the XP Pro cd's from my laptops either. However, I'm hesitant to run out and get another cd/dvd drive because I find it really hard to believe that the drive just happened to fail physically in coincidence with reinstalling windows. In addition, the BIOS sees it fine and the drive lights up and spins before the computer ends up giving up on it and attempting to boot up to the C drive. I just don't know what to do-i'm afraid if i go out and buy a new dvd/cd drive that the problem isn't the hardware and it will be the same problem.

thanks again in advance

Pretty much any IDE drive should work. As suggested previously, you could try booting from a floppy (if you have one) and seeing if the CD works.

It is hard to debug a system without a good selection of spare parts.

Peter