[Felix The Assassin]

You are really going to have to slide open the case, and do the physical switch out on thsoe CD rom drives. From what you have reported, the good drive is the slave to the bad drive, and therefore is not being checked. It is going to have to be brought up to master, and little cross plug on the back refitted. I intentionally rebuild my rig at a minimum of thrice annually, so it's really not that big a deal. Speaking of which, there are more OSs on here than music at the moment, but Fall is just around the bend. As 'Bungleau' above points out, you will have to use that Dell CD, (me tinks). The only store bought PC in the house is the spousal unit's, and I have never touched it since setting it up. No experience with rebuilding a proprietary rig, but have the inkling that CD is going to be your only salvation. Once you get it going, you will be asked if you want to format, chose yes, and go from there.

If you are just wanting to play with DOS, boot under that floppy thingie, and type fdisk then enter. You should be presented with an fdisk menu, bust down all of your partitions on that HDD. Once you reboot, leaving that disk in, type format C: it will ask you, answer Yes then again, and it will begin. Size dependent of your HDD, this might be a few hours. Then change BIOS over to CD, Then HDD. and boot from the Dell CD. It should be painless from there. Keep in mind Dell likes to have 3 partitions, 1 for Dell, 1 for ???, and 1 for you the user.