Bad CD drive???

[Robert Hagg]

I have a dell poweredge 2550. When I put an installation CD in the CD drive, it
doesn't recognize it. ie. The disk won't boot to the install menu. The cd works fine on other systems. I'm thinking I have a bad CD drive.

I currently don't have a working OS on that machine. I plan to attempt
installing XP as a test, but do not expect a different result.

Somewhere along the way the Utilities function/partition "F10" was
deleted/corrupted. Is there a way to recover that utility? I seem to recall
there are a number of test functions I may be able to use in order to test the
hardware if I can restore the utility FAT partition.

If I can recover this utility, can I test the CD? Is it possible to purchase an
upgrade CD/DvD for the 2550?

Regards,
R. Hagg
University of Washington
School of Oceanography