FORMAT & REINSTALL HELP!!!!

[DontKnowMe]

I need some type of help formatting and reinstalling windows xp. i tried to do it the first time around and some how or another ended up with two xp running at the sametime (big lesson learned). Then i tried to boot from my windows xp cd to format and reinstall but keep getting a mesage saying boot from cd failure. then tried to do the 6 windows xp disk setup boot, but got a message saying could not load hal.dll file. now i'm completely lost on what to do. i have talked to a couple techs and the price they are willing to charge to fix my computer i could just end up getting a new hard drive being that i want to delete everything anyway, right. Being that i don't have the money for either, trying to figure it out myself is my only option right now. If someone is able to help me i would be very grateful, because. having to deal with this computer in its current state is very stressful because it takes almost an hour to do something that normally would take 15-20 mins. I already have a headache alone from trying to type this post HELP!!!!!!!!!!

 

[GavinO]

Ok, to fix this, you need to do the following:

-Boot to a DOS prompt (a Linux bash prompt will do as well, but your Windows install media will get you a DOS prompt)
-Kill your partition table
-Reboot (not strictly necessary, but I always do it out of superstition)
-Boot to the Windows setup
-Paritition and format the disk from the installer
-Install

The first step is simple; you should be able to insert the CD and start the machine. Check your BIOS settings to make sure that you have the CD drive first in the boot order. There should be some sort of option to drop back to a command or shell prompt. Once you have a prompt, run 'fdisk'. Delete any partitions that you see, and exit.

Rebooting is straightforward; hit the reset button or cycle power, depending on what sort of features your case has.

Since we booted from the CD in the first step, hopefully it will boot again. The first thing the installer should do is ask if you want to install windows (you do), and then it will ask about partitioning. There are two general schools of thought on partitions: Once giant partition for the whole drive, or a partition for the operating system and software, and a separate one for your home directory (Documents and Settings). The second option is nice if you have a tendancy to break windows installs. The installer will ask about a partition type; you probably want NTFS (FAT32 is an older filesystem, that doesn't support some of the features that NTFS does). After that point, you can pretty much accept defaults for everything until you get to the configuration steps at the end. These are pretty self explanitory; you fill out things like users' names and the time zone.

The main stumbling block here sounds like it will be booting from the CD. The system of floppies used to jump start the boot process is a real pain (as you found out), so you should make all efforts to boot directly from the CD. At what stage in the boot process does the error about the CD failing occur? Has the CD started and is complaining about something, or has the BIOS been unable to boot from the CD?

 

[DontKnowMe]

i have my computer set up to start with the cdrom first but when i start it, it will get the cd boot failure message right before it goes in the starting windows process so i can't get to the option where i ask whether i want to boot from the cd or not because i can never reach that point using the cd. and how do i get a dos prompt from the start of the computer?

 

[xarryier]

I may be able to help . I have reinstalled Windows XP Home Edition many times from knowing very little of computers and have tried what you have tried and learned some of these things the hard way . I have seen those errors Windows told you while I was learning too . So where shall we start ?

 

[GavinO]

Is there any damage to the disc? If the BIOS is throwing the CD boot error, then there is a problem with the actual disc not working as a bootable CD. After the failure, does it attempt to boot from the hard drive?