go into your bios and look for boot devices or boot device priority and set the cd rom drive to be number 1 and your hard drive to number 2 then just slap your windows cd in the drive and when you turn on the pc it should boot from the cd drive. if you still have no luck it may be that the cd your using isnt bootable (likely if its not original) in this case you can run a fresh install from within windows
i have my cdrom first on the list and wont load. windows xp is original disk. not sure what else to do
some computers just dont seem to like booting from disks i have a few that have given me similar problems in the past. if you want to do a fresh install put the windows cd in your drive (while your in windows) and click on install windows XP when it says setup type change the dropdown box from "upgrade (recomended)" to "new installation (advanced)" and it will copy over the setup files and boot the setup from your hard drive rather than the cd however this wont work if the windows your running is newer than the one your installing (i.e if the disk is sp1 but you upgraded to sp2)
