A question for all the expert techies.

[Shankstah]

I wish to dual boot windows 7 with my windows xp, i'd like to test out the os and see how it performs on this crap rig.

Doing so requires that I partition my hdd and installing win7 requires that I boot from the dvd that i burned the iso from.

My issue is that I cannot boot from the dvd because, i possess only an external usb drive.

BIOS does not have the option to boot from the external usb dvd.

is there any way to trick the bios to boot from another source and have it redirect to the external usb dvd drive? if so is there a step by step way of doing it?

I am staying away from vmware , because this machine sucks too much to do that.

I have a winxp sp3, dell dimension 2400, phoenix bios, 1 gig of ram.

[Drunken F00l]

is there any way to trick the bios to boot from another source and have it redirect to the external usb dvd drive?

Not that I know of. Maybe you could burn a DOS boot disk CD or something with the drivers for your USB DVD drive and then start the installation from there.

[N0body]

Do you have the most recent bios version for your mobo?