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Yes you can use a usb external cd/dvd-rom to any operating system as long as the bios allows you to, most bios's have the capability.
When the external usb drive has been connected power up the mechine, in post it should tell what to press to enter your boot menu without entering your bios and choose usb drive to boot.
u must either have one of the foll...to boot and install OS...also the seq in BIOS must be availabe and enabled
1 Floppy
2 CD Rom Drive - internal
3 CD Rim Drive - External connected thru USB
4 You can also try to connect a USB pen drive having the OS install program and try - I have not tried that so not sure if this option works...sorry
5 If u can open the machine then u can connect another internal HD(this can contain ur OS install files) to the cable (connector points in the flat cable) that connect your internal HD to the Motherboard.
if i can think of anything else i will post
all the best
Typically, a computer tries to "boot" from several devices:
1. 3.5-inch diskette
2. internal CD-ROM
3. internal disk-drive
4. USB memory-stick
5. network (if a "boot-server" can be found on the network)
6. external diskette
7. external CD-ROM
8. external disk-drive
So, in your case, either
* the "boot-order" _EXCLUDES_ your disk-drive,
* your disk-drive is not connected,
* your disk-drive is connected, but is "dead" (not responding)
Not being able to boot from the disk-drive, your computer probes, via the network, for a "boot-server". Finding none, your computer reports, in a strange way, that "network cable is not connected to a boot-server".
So, the "check cable" means that the Ethernet cable between the network-port on your computer and the boot-server may be "unconnected".
What this could mean is that your disk-drive is "dead".
Take the computer to a qualified technician, for more trouble-shooting.
Make sure the BIOS is fully updated from the HP website. Most DL3-series servers supported booting from an external USB cd, try F10 or F12 at boot in order to bring up a boot menu.
Another common way around installation is to copy the whole contents of the CD / DVD to a hard drive.
There are a few methods.
My proffered is to make a bootable flash drive on another machine with known working capabilities that will bot into either an XP-pre installation scenario or a Dos based one.
From there it is often possible to start the installation or even copy the required files to a drive on a machine.
Advantage of copying the files is that the CD / DVD would never be needed to add additional component as they are stored on the machine itself.
That also speeds up installation dramatically.
Bios consideration mus be taken into account when booting from flash drives.
Proper external Hard drives are another viable option
you need to set the boot device priority in the BIOS in such a way that the computer will take an external CD/DVD-drive as first boot device. to do this, you need to enable USB legacy support first, save and exit from the BIOS settings and then return to the BIOS to set the USB-CD/DVD-drive as primary boot device.
The Dell original standard CD drive shipped with the PE2600 is incapable of 'understanding' the latest generation of bootable CD's (no matter what the BIOS says).
As far as I can tell, it's not fixable in the firmware ..
However you can swap it out for a more modern drive - such as the TS-L462C (which is a plug in replacement combined DVD reader / CD reader/writer - and Dell post the required drivers on their PE 2600 web pages, so I assume it must be a 'supported' solution)
You can either do this in the BIOS or (easier) just run a Linux installer (such as Ubuntu) and it will offer to do it for you when it sees Windows-formatted partitions.
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