Boot problem in Windows XP

[DupliN]

Hello guys. I have a problem with an old PC. When i try to boot from USB, i select in the Diskette, the USB as first, but the PC still boots windows, and i have a DVD Rom who appears with ! in the BIOS, and i can't use it as boot machine. Even in Windows XP, that is already installed in the PC, the DVD doesn't read any DVD's or CD's. What to do guys? I'm desperate.

http://imgur.com/a/KoJk8
here are some pictures

 

[BFG-9000]

Flash drive formatted Fat32? And what software did you use to make the USB drive bootable?

Worst case, there are USB drivers for DOS so you could boot from floppy to read the USB stick.

 

[DupliN]

I formatted the flash drive first in fat32, with rufus, didn't work. Then i formatted in NTFS with Rufus, didn't work, i formatted then with WinToFlash, still didn't work. I tried with RawWriter (or smth like that) but it said "The device is not ready", and it doesn't do nothing. Still, i have the floppy disk in My Computer, and when i double click it it says "Please insert a disket", but when i try to write an image on him, error.. I really wanna make this PC work, it's like a challenge.

 

[BFG-9000]

There's a chance the USB stick is just too large or just incompatible so try another.

Ancient floppy drives often need a cleaning before they'll work, and I now have a stack of dead optical drives as they've been dying off one by one. So I use one good DVD burner in an external USB enclosure for cases like these! I also have a USB floppy drive which has seen some use too.

Worst case, I'll install the HDD in another computer to copy the installation files to it, with the caveat that installing from DOS only works with a FAT32 HDD which of course only works with up to XP (if it's a desktop though you can install from the FAT32 HDD to a different NTFS one). Copying io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com to the HDD first before anything else makes the HDD bootable to DOS and is equivalent to the old SYS command.