Trying to bring back a old pc to life

[KainRose]

Alright heres the thing, I got a dell Optiplex Gx300 with a 900 Mhz pent 3 cpu, 256 mb of Ram and agp card slot(currently i got a Nvidea in it)
It has two hds, one ten gb(came with it when i bought it) and another 10, the system was wiped off all things other then the bios, uponing tinkering it took me a hour to find the right config to load the Hd's in the bios, but For the last week I have been unsuccess full in getting it to accept any cd drive at all, it will not come up, I was wondering is there a work around and if not, would it be possible to install say Xp pro or linux on on of the hd;s via another pc then swap that hd to this one and have it load, In reality this is a time issue because I want to surprise my uncle with a pc of his own before he moves back to michigan currently he has 2 weeks before he leaves from nebraska, Much thanks if you can help.

[Gecko]

I know that you can not load windows XP on one system and then expect it to work in a different system.
It won't boot up, the OS it is too machine specific not like the old windows 98 days.
I have never tied doing this with a Linux os.

Have you tried jumping the CD drive to cable select and see if that works?

Have you tried disconnecting one of the HDDs and then connect the CD drive?