Booting from Win XP CD

Hi guys, i've had a problem with cousins and friends computer. When trying to install WinXP on to an empty hardisk, i set the BIOS to boot from CD-Rom, put the WinXP CD in, and restart the computer. The thing is, it searches the CD-ROM and is unable to boot.

The weird thing is that this worked fine on my computer, and 2 of my other friends computers. I was able to boot from the winxp disk and install it fine. Why doesn't it work on my cousins and friends pcs?

NB: cousins pc is an athlon 500, and friends is a new p4 2.0gig.

Not sure actually. I didn't have any other bootable cds. The winxp cd i was using, i had used a couple of other times on my systems successfully. I don't think their drives defective are defective as there are no other apparent problems with their cd-roms.

Its a copy. But it works fine on my two computers at home. I can but from it no probs.

Both had 2, and another persons i tried it on (whose didn't work) had 1. Both cd-roms where setup on the secondary ide channel i think.

That's cool. No no errors. Just stalls on the part where it says something like "Booting from CD" and periods trail the screen ............

Then it says that the OS can't be found.

NOt scratched as its worked in 4 other systems. Hard drives are formatted normally (one partition, fat32) just like they were formatted on the machines that the cd-bootup worked.