[igork]

I don't know if I posted this in the right section but I'll give it a shot. I have a Dell Dimension Desktop 4600 and the hard-drive died but fortunately I have two more spare hard-drives one 60GB from an Emachine computer and another 60GB from an HP Pavilion. I know for sure that the Hp HDD works and when I swapped the hard-drive into the dell computer it gave me an error: "Could not load operating system" which I thought would be normal because the Dell and Hp require different drivers to run. However, I thought that I would be able to boot the Dell Operating system from CD and install it on the HP hard-drive however the even though I check off the option to boot off of the cd and I uncheck everything else it still gives me the same error. So I was wondering if somehow I could utilize the HP hard-drive in the dell computer or would I need to purchase a new hard-drive?

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First I must ask if you are sure that your cd drive is really your first boot, if you are certain of it then:

Maybe your Dell CD is a non bootable cd because you had a recovery partition on your old dead hard drive (by pushing F12, F10 or...) and this how it would reinstall your system and the cd you have is for drivers and other programs or extras.

Try it with your other hard drive (the brand name of the HD is of no issue except for if IDE or Sata type) and if it does the same (not booting from CD) then you should consider that your Dell cd is non bootable.

WEorst come to worst test your Dell CD on another computer and try to boot from it to see if it works.

[Alzeimer]

First I must ask if you are sure that your cd drive is really your first boot, if you are certain of it then:

Maybe your Dell CD is a non bootable cd because you had a recovery partition on your old dead hard drive (by pushing F12, F10 or...) and this how it would reinstall your system and the cd you have is for drivers and other programs or extras.

Try it with your other hard drive (the brand name of the HD is of no issue except for if IDE or Sata type) and if it does the same (not booting from CD) then you should consider that your Dell cd is non bootable.

WEorst come to worst test your Dell CD on another computer and try to boot from it to see if it works.

[igork]

First I must ask if you are sure that your cd drive is really your first boot, if you are certain of it then:

Maybe your Dell CD is a non bootable cd because you had a recovery partition on your old dead hard drive (by pushing F12, F10 or...) and this how it would reinstall your system and the cd you have is for drivers and other programs or extras.

Try it with your other hard drive (the brand name of the HD is of no issue except for if IDE or Sata type) and if it does the same (not booting from CD) then you should consider that your Dell cd is non bootable.

WEorst come to worst test your Dell CD on another computer and try to boot from it to see if it works.

Yup, I'm certain that the cd drive is the first boot and also I have used the Dell CD to update other dell computers that I have. The CD says "Operating System Windows XP service pack A1".

[Alzeimer]

OK having a previous OS install on an HD should not prevent you from booting from your CD, so the issue might be your CD-rom.

Also did you try pressing F12 (I think on Dells it is the F to press) before windows usually starts to load so to give you the Boot Menu option, maybe from there you can choose your cd-rom and boot from your CD.