I am so lost - formatted hard drive, now it only recognizes a:

[cajunsunshyne]

Before I formatted the c: drive the computer recognized the CD-Rom drive and also a: & c:. When it was rebooting it came back up telling me that it was an invalid drive and that it was booting from the CD-Rom. Then it gave me the message that it could not find the CD-Rom. I got to a command prompt and it recognizes a: but no other letter drive. I have tried a-z. I do not have a windows 98 start up disk, and I wanted to put WinXP back on it anyway. Anybody have any suggestions?

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Put your Windows XP disk into your cd-rom, and go into your bios.

Set the boot priority to Floppy(a)/Cd-rom(d)/Hard drive(c).

Save and exit bios. When your computer reboots, you should see a message that says "press any key to boot from cd". Press any key, and follow the onscreen instructions for installing Windows XP.

You can delete/create partitions and format your hard drive in the NTFS file system.

At some point in the installation, your computer will reboot. Again you will be asked to press any key to boot from cd. DO NOT press any key a second time, as this will start the installation from scratch again.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave: