Booting Windows from an External CD Drive

Aloha,

The internal hard drive on my wife's Dell Inspiron 6000 crashed, so I'm getting a replacement hard drive from Dell. I'll need to boot up as well as install XP and other software, but her internal CD ROM drive doesn't work. (She hasn't really needed it before, so we just didn't replace it. I don't want to buy a new one ($110 from Dell) just for the installation.) (No floppy, either.)

So I'm thinking that if it's possible to boot up and install windows from an external CD, then I'll just find one to borrow.

Any help is much appreciated.
Mahalo,
Rick

Can you try to open the computer and check what type of cd drive sata or ide. You can also go to Best Buy or some other online shop and buy one. They are cheap and easy to install, unless Dell did something stupid. Someone else here could confirm if it really needs to be a Dell drive.

My main question is: Will Windows boot from an external CD ROM drive?

Thanks for your help

I dont think so, how can it possibly do that? You will not be able to boot from an external Hard Drive.

OK, thank you all for your help.
Rick

Actutally, the bios is the controlling factor whether the USB CD drive will allow you to boot the Windows Install CD from it. I don't know if the Ins. 6000 will allow booting from an external CD drive attached to the USB or not. You could find one and try it and if it fails, you could still use the drive once you found a way to boot. Some newer Laptops will boot from the USB Connected drive. You can check if yours will by using a USB stick. You can get a DOS boot from searching it on the web.