[Eagle132]

I am trying to reformat my old Dell Inspiron 8600 and install a fresh copy of Windows XP professional. The top optical drive is only a CD ROM drive, and the bottom is both CD and DVD. However, I believe the top optical drive to be broken, because it keeps making strange noises and having errors when I try to run disks in it. The bottom works great.

When I boot to a CD, my computer only gives me the option to boot to the top IDE drive. It doesn't even show the second optical drive in the Boot Menu. When I try to install Windows with the top drive, there is always an error.

I keep trying to find a way to boot from the second optical drive, but It simply doesn't appear in the boot menu or BIOS. I really aren't sure why this is because it works perfectly with the current version of windows that is running.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[cwwozniak]

Originally Posted by Eagle132

Dell Inspiron 8600
...
The top optical drive is only a CD ROM drive, and the bottom is both CD and DVD.

According to Dell's documentation the Inspiron 8600 is a notebook computer with a single optical drive. I could not find any reference to a desktop Inspiron 8600 model.

EDIT: If it is a different model Dell desktop, is there any reason you can't disconnect the non-working CD drive and make the CD/DVD drive the new bootable CD-drive? It may require switching connectors on the drives and moving some jumpers on the drives.