im trying to reinstall windows from a cd but nothing happens?!?

Your boot sequence is probably set wrong in your BIOS. Enter the BIOS and make sure that the CD is set to boot before the the hard drive. That should cure the problem.

I think that Dells have a separate boot menu to specify which device to boot from. Try booting the computer and pressing F12, it should then bring up a list of devices and let you choose the cd drive.

Alternatively, if you still have the original Dell hard disk in your machine and it has not been reformatted already, you can probably access the recovery partition.

Try booting up and pressing ctrl-F11. If you time it right (sometimes it takes a few goes to get it) then a utility program starts up that will re-image your hard disk just as it came from the factory. This is a much quicker way to reinstall Windows as it uses Ghost.

BTW you do realize that doing either of these things is going to completely wipe all the information from your computer don't you? Have you backed up any important documents/music/photos etc from your computer first?

Go into your computers BIOS (There will be a message on your screen telling you what to press, it changes for all computers, I've seen Tab, F10, F1, etc). Since most BIOS menus are different from one another it's hard to say what the actual option will be but you're looking for the "Boot Order".

Make sure your CD drive is set to be the first in the boot order, followed by your Floppy (if you have one) and then your Hard Drive (Operating System).

If that doesn't work, there should be another option to enable CD-ROM booting.

I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but theres to many variations in different BIOS'. Just look around for the Boot Order.

Hi,

The problem is that your first boot device had been changed to Hard disc

You can change the boot device by going to the CMOS setup by pressing F2 or change the boot device by pressing F10/Del key

if the boot device option appears choose the CD ROM drive , but make sure that the re-installation CD is in the tray. and click enter.

If you are in the CMOS setup search for boot device priority and choose CD ROM drive as your first boot device. this will help you

save the configuration and exit.

The next time your PC boots it will search for bootabe media in the CD Drive if not found it will boot from the hard disc.

Best Luck

Have a great day.

Press on start, select the my computer option, press the add new program option, press on the CD option and follow any further instructions.

Put the cd in the player, close the drawer, then restart your computer.

If the computer didn't ask you about the disk, try going into "My Computer" and double-click on the drive that you put the disk in, maybe the disk wasn't on auto-run. Unless you did this already, then I don't know...