A local school got rid of some DELLS.  Pentium III and 128 megs of ram, 866 Mhz.  How do I load an operating system on this computer?  Right now it doesn't even have Dos on it.You FIRST need to 'get' an operating system, w2k springs to mind  I understand and I have one.  As a matter of fact, I have windows 2000, however, the machine only recognizes that it has the a drive.  The CD ROM works, but the system has been wiped to the point that I can't boot from the CDROM drive.  I have a generic DOS disk that has some dos files on it.  Can I use it somehow to get the system to recognize the other drives?socraturk.....If you look at the dos files on the floppy ,you will probably find several dos files as well as some generic cd rom drivers .......so load that disk and then see if the cd drive is recognised ........if it is you should then be able to boot from it .........

dl65  Grab a Win2K disk from bootdisk.com....extract it to a floppy and boot with it. Select "start with CDRom support" and it will load the drivers for your CDRom.

On the boot screen it will show you which drive is your CDRom.

If E: for EXAMPLE type E: and hit enter.
Then at the E: prompt type setup and you're good to go.

patio.  Press F2 on boot and you can get to the boot sequence option. That late of a model can boot directly from CDROM.Is the hard-drive physically present, or has the school removed them?

128 MB of RAM is low, even for Windows 2000, 512 MB would be much better.

HOW TO CREATE SETUP BOOTDISKS FOR WINDOWS 2000

Click on the link below to find bootdisks for Windows 2000.

BOOTDISK ARCHIVE