I need to boot off a DVD on my older Dell Dimension 2400.

The main CD drive is a 48x CD-RW, the slave is a [unkown speed] DVD Player.

I tried booting off a DVD but it will not work, and a friend said I need to switch the CD-ROM with the DVD Player, turning the DVD Player from a slave to a main drive.

How can I do this?

The first thing you could try is getting into your BIOS, pressing DEL (or F2 probably) key when u turn on the computer. Inside these options, you may change the "boot order" so u can choose which device is the 1st one to boot. Example: 1. Boot from floppy 2. From CD-ROM 3. From HDD

Some old machines allow to pick the drive u want to boot from, even if it is the slave.

If this doesnt work, you can set the DVD drive to master:

Open the PC case, and watch at the rear of each drive. U may need to unplug the IDE cable and the Power Cable too. Just "interchange" the position of the drives.

Then look on the "map" you have printed on the drives and check the little Jumper position for the master/slave cases.

Usually, the master position of the jumper is right near the power cable. The slave position is in "one to the left" to the master position. This may get confusing now, but I'm sure you will notice this as soon as you open the case and check the drives.

Connect again the drives and voila!

Remember: Switch the drives position on your CPU case, because the MASTER device has to be ALWAYS in the edge of the IDE cable. Put your DVD drive on the edge of the IDE, and the SLAVE cd rom on the middle connector.

I hope this can help you a little. I'm sure there is a lot of info on the net about this.

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Thanks for all the info, I'll try it tomorrow.

I checked the BIOs and since this is a Dell, there are very little changes that can be done.

Dell PCs work by the exact same way all the computers do. Doing what you were told should fix your issue.

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"Organ - king of instruments," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Yep, I switched my CD and DVD drives, booted from a DVD and reinstalled my operating system.

Windows displayed the BSOD... grr lol