Im pretty new to working with hardware so that might explain some of this but i was just looking for some help before i give up and take it to a pro. My computer started acting funny and is pretty full of junk so i want to start from scratch. I started by backing what i want to save on an external hard drive. From the bios menu i change the boot sequence to a cd-rom. I have a maufacture disk which came with the computer so i put that in and boot from it. It goes through all the drives and does what ever it does. Then a menu comes up and asks what i want to do, repair, use the recovery console and so on. so i go to the recovery console and a message appears which says that XP does not recognize an installed hard drive. i have done nothing to my hard drive and dont understand why it wont recognize it. I have read many forums and it sounds like a pretty straight forward process to reformat the hard drive and reinstall XP. so i was just lookin for some advise anyone might have.