Hi Guys
I got all my parts, and put them together to test that they work. I had installed an old CD drive I took out of an old Pentuim, and when I turned the computer on and tried to boot from a Windows XP disk to load the operating system, I got some problems. When I inserted the disk and hit Enter, as the screen told me to, the computer wouldn't recognize the disk and just told me to enter a bootable disk and hit Enter.

I looked up the CD-ROM drive (NEC CDR-272) and found that it is only a 4X drive. Can you even boot from an XP disk only using a 4X drive? I also tried using a NEC CDR-1900A CD-ROM drive (I think it is a 32x?) that I took out of a broken Pentium 2, and that drive didn't work either. This time I could hear the disk spinning, and it waited a little longer until it told me to try again, but it still didn't work. I think that computer was hit by lightning, but I don't know if that affected the CD drive or not.

I may just have to get a new drive.
I have been thinking of getting a new CD-RW drive that can also play DVDs. If it burns DVDs also that would be nice. What are some good DVD+/-RW drives that aren't too expensive? My case is black, so I would prefer one that has a black face, though that wouldn't be a deciding factor. I was looking here:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_a...7%5B%5D=10:394

and the NEC ND-3540A Dual Layer DVD±RW Writer looks pretty nice. Do you know if it is any good, or do you know of any others that would be better and cheaper?

If you have a blank Hard drive, when you boot from the XP disk, is that when you would partition the HD, and then contine by loading the OS? Or do you have to use a DOS disk to Partition the drive first?


Also, I have an old WD 2GIG HD I took from another computer, and tried booting from that thinking that once I was in the windows environment, I could load XP onto my main, blank 160 GIG drive. When trying to boot from the 2Gb drive (which has Win 95) it said that HIMEM.SYS, or something like that, was missing. Is there a way to put that on a floppy and transfer it to the HD so I can boot from it again?

Actually as I think about it, I don't remember my motherboard saying it was compatible with Win 95. Would it still work, or could it mess something up?