Regardless of what's on the hard drive, the system should still boot from an optical drive, assuming you insert a bootable CD or DVD.  Insert a bootable CD in the drive and reboot. Quickly press F12 and select "Boot from CD" from the menu. The CD should load all the drivers needed to run the optical drive.  If it won't boot from the optical drive, that suggests the drive (conincidentally) may have died. You might consider following the instructions here to remove and then reinstall the optical drive in case it got jarred and is not making connections with the motherboard.  Is it possible you caused some damage when you removed the hard drive which affected the motherboard and/or optical drive? The 66 MB on the hard drive are probably the Dell Diagnostics utilities. You can try booting from the hard drive, quickly press F12 and select "Diagnostics" (or similar) from the menu. You will need a data disk in the optical drive before you start the diagnostics in order to test that drive. Without a data disk, the optical drive will fail the diagnostics, even if it's perfectly ok. Ron  
Dear Dell community people,   I have a rather serious problem now and I'd ask for you help. Here is what happened:   I decided to reinstall my XP home on my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. Put the CD in, formatted and installed without any problem. After XP began running I decided to install MediaDirect too from the CD came with the laptop. Then I realised that it has to be installed before the XP... So I said, okay delete and make your things, then I install XP again, I have time... MD said it was time to change the CD to XP and install it. Changed and rebooted, but it just gave strange sounds, doing nothing. A rhythmic buzz was all the CD driver gave. I had the idea, that it might be because of the wrong order of installation. Got the HDD out, put into a PC and formatted it. Put it back to the laptop and the answer whatever CD I tried to use - missing NTLDR. HDD out, using EUSEUS partition manager I found 2 gigs of MD on the HDD. Deleted that and formatted the hard disk again, making everything to plain as new (I suppose). Tried again - nothing, but missing NTLDR. Got the HDD out, into the PC and began to install XP on that hard disc. When finished copying the main files and restarted I got the HDD back to the laptop. Result - nice blue screen saying the problem may be because of a newly installed hard drive. Tried booting from the CD - the strange rhythmic buzzing sound. Tried booting from USB and updating the BIOS - no result. BIOS recognises the DVD drive and the HDD. Checked the HDD in the PC - 100% error free. Checked the XP CD - 100% working. The MD disc made something bad?? For me it seems from the strange sound the CD gives, that it is not reading, just running around sometimes. May the DVD drive crashed after the MD install? I've found some people having similar problems, but not the same... Could you please advise me something new? I don't want MD anymore just want to get my laptop with XP back. Thank you! Balázs
Help please!