Your Dell Operating System CD "For reinstallation" should boot okay, but be cautious. Some laptop makers in the past started the CD reinstallation autorun with "Format C:\," which may not really be what you want. Of course that may be okay if you're really starting with a new Hard Drive, but if you're just trying to turn the machine on, you may have to "abort" the automatic run once the machine starts to keep it from trying to erase everything. My current Dell laptop, about 3 yrs old, doesn't try to format automatically, so I doubt that you'll run into that problem.

The possible "clinker" here is that the BIOS has to be set to look at the CD drive during boot. If it's set up that way, booting with a CD in the drive that doesn't have the boot sector may give you a "Disk does not contain startup - replace disk and hit any key." People sometimes reset the BIOS to NOT look at the CD drive, if they have a habit of leaving a CD in place (not a recommended practice). Some, but not all, newer machines will look at the CD drive and boot from it if there's a bootable disk there, but ignore a non-boot CD. That's probably the case with a Dell laptop less than a few years old.

If you're talking about an internal laptop drive, your friend will likely take it to a "service guy" for installation, and any competent service person will be able to start the machine. If your friend is knowledgeable enough to do the installation, friend will figure it out as well. The recommended boot disk you should have was to allow you to get a restart while you're trying to limp along with the existing HD. If the HD goes completely, rebooting probably wouldn't do you much good anyway, so maybe it's just an academic exercise.

Pending a real fix, about all you can really do is backup, cross two toes, and hope it keeps running (crossing fingers makes it too tough to type).

John