I made a bootable flash drive with xp pro, sportmau boot cd, hiren's boot cd, and one with the recovery console, on it.
I plug the flash into the front usb port of my dell, restart pc, press F2, and removable media is now one of the choices, it is not there unless I have my flash connected. otherwise only cd, floppy and harddrive are the choices.
it will work with xp home also, but I do not have an installation cd for home only pro.