Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: Failure

[LTOwnalot]

I am fixing a friend's computer right now, her dad bought a new 300 gb hard drive but didn't know what a partition is apparently, and accidentally partitioned the hard drive into a 10 gb partition.
Usually this would be pretty straigh forward to fix, just switch to boot sequence to boot from CD Rom, put the XP installation CD in the drive and reboot the computer. Then use the Recovery Console on the CD to delete the partition and make a new one.
It didn't go that smoothly though, because even though I set it to boot from CD in the BIOS, it tells me "Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: Failure" and defaults to boot from C:
So I tried making XP boot disks (the ones from Microsoft's website), but it says "Disk I/O Error" when I tried to boot from the floppy.

Does anyone know why I can't boot the XP CD from the cd drive? I tried using the other cd drive on the computer too, designated drive F:, I set F: to be the primary boot device but it just get ignored that or so it seems. It doesn't even give the failure message and just boot from C: right after POST.

I am sure it's not a problem with the XP CD, it's a genuine XP with SP2 Cd, and it worked fine when I tried it on my own computer.

Any help would be very much appreciated

 

[bendixG15]

Check that the CDROM is working..maybe dad pulled the wires out.
Same with floppy.

(I know its a bit basic, but I did that once..and the error messages drove me nuts)

 

[LTOwnalot]

Thanks, but unfortunately the issue isn't so simple in this case =[
I checked the CDROM and the floppy drives as one of the first things I did. The cd and floppy runs normally (autoruns normally, i can explore the cd contents when logged into Windows, and so on)
It just won't boot from them