When i boot windows xp as best as can be cd it loads up fine and at the bottom of the screen it says press any key to boot from cd so i do.
but after that the screen changes to ask which way i want to boot windows and my only option is to boot windows normally and that doesnt work.

Any suggestions?

sounds to me like 1 of 2 things...

you are not hitting any key quick enough
or
the key you are hitting is not working correctly.

solution. try tapping the spacebar a couple times...

I dont think thats the problem but ill try.

that is about the only possibility.

if you are getting the prompt to press a key to continue then the cdrom is reading the cd and is booting as the first accessible boot device...

the only other option i can think of is modifying your boot list in bios to ONLY boot to the cdrom.

ya it wasnt the keyboard i tested it on another computer, so ill try this new way.

short of that... i have never seen this happen this way before.. unless... you have a USB/wireless keyboard or something that may not have drivers in a pre windows mode..... but if you can get to bios that would eliminate that as well.

Nope that didnt work either.

Hard Drive corruption

You may have a hard drive issue. Try booting it up on a bootable disk. You'll need access to a winXP machine to create it. right click on the A:\ in My computer and hit the create MSDos Startup Disk option. After you boot up your system with it. type "c:" to see if you can actually get access to the disk. Does this work?

Perhaps there is a problem with the CD or the CD device. I had a problem once installing XP only to find the CD device had a problem. I installed a new one and was then able to install XP. Or maybe there a scratch on the CD where the boot files reside.

XP wont boot from cd?

I had the same problem. I usually dont have a problem reinstalling windows. But this time if i press any key to boot from cd, nothing happens. Turns out id purchased another keyboard between my last install and now. Some USB keyboards have a problem, Logitech does and some others. The usb support loads a few seconds too slow and your keyboard only activates after windows screen comes up. However you think the keyboard works because pressing delete still gets you into bios?

Solution is to find an old style keyboard with the purple round plug with the pins in it. Remove the USB keyboard , connect older keyboard (press any key to boot from cd).
then once windows is installed replace with usb keyboard . Problem solved.

Do you have another PC you can try the XP disk in? A damaged disk will behave exactly as you describe.

True also of USB keyboards where the legacy USB devices have not been enabled in the BIOS.

The only reason i answered this post after so long is, this only just happened to me and its taken me 3 days to solve. I thought some poor bugger out there must be having this problem still? and i couldnt find any answers except to check boot sequence. This has got to help someone?

No worries - most of the time we have no idea when a problem gets a fix so a revived thread is always interesting!

I think AlbertLionheart knows the problem. I failed to realise that the legacy USB devices needed to be installed. Well.... I know now

This is still a problem in 2009. Just had it happen to me today with the Logitech board. Even after it gets past the "Press any Key to boot from CD", it still won't let me boot into Safe Mode.

I also tried the NEW|OLD KEYBOARD trick. Nope. Didn't work. I'll try it again, but I may have a big boat anchor for sale.