I am working on setting up a Dell PowerEdge 2500 server with Windows Server 2003 (SP1) on it for use as a WSUS server. I acquired it and felt it would be a good to use if I can get it to work. It has three hard drives, all 18GB a piece, along with a floppy drive and CD-Rom. The CD drive does not read anything so I have been using a USB external CD-Rom drive to open files and such. I need to wipe the hard drives since the partitions are not setup correctly and I have no space to install anything on it and I can't seem to reformat the drives. However, I need a CD-Rom drive (and have limited budget funds so I can't purchase a SCSI drive) to boot up to in order to install an operating system.

Can anyone offer any help in getting a USB external CD drive to become bootable or a way to get to the boot menu where I can force it to startup to the external? I'm all out of ideas.