Be sure your boot order has the optical drive as first and the hard drive as second or lower.
Then cold boot to the Windows CD... and sort out the BIOS difficulties, if any, that flash on the screen. Do a partition removal. Then when all partitions are gone, to a reformat and reinstall as below:
Insert your Windows XP installation disc into your CD drive … Home and Professional are the same.
You want to go to the drive, remove all the partitions, then perhaps install new partitions, and format the partitions that remain… hopefully none for this exercise.
As your computer begins to boo, you may get a screen directing you to “Press any key to boot from CD… and now you press your favorite key.
A blue screen will load up, and load the files it requires. When finished it may list a few options, such as “Press ENTER to set up Windows XP.” So you do that next
You should find yourself at a screen to select the drive to which you choose to install Windows.
It is at this point that you can delete old partitions and format drives. The box in the bottom half of the screen shows all your drives and the partitions that exist on them. Use your Up and Down arrow keys to highlight the “C:” drive partition and press the 'D' key (If you have only “Unpartitioned space” and have no C: or D: partitions, you may move past this decision).
On your next screen depress the 'L' key to finalize deleting the partition.
Next, you can choose where to install Windows. The little blue and white box at the bottom of the screen will no longer show a partition. It will merely show “Unpartitioned space with the number of megabytes of raw space, xyz MB.” Choose this decision with your arrow keys, then depress the 'C' key to create a new partition on the drive. The next screen tells you the minimum and maximum sizes the partition can be and lets you pick the parititon size. The default size is the maximum size available, rounded off to meet mathematical calculations. Compare that the number with what is entered as the maximum and depress <enter>.
Now you will find yourself at the install Windows screen. But now you will have a partition that looks something like this “C: Partition1 [New (Raw)]xyzMB.” Highlight this choice and depress <enter>.
The next screen lets you choose the file system with which format the drive. Nearly always, you will want to select NTFS as it is faster and more secure. If the drive is new and unused, you can use one of the options that ends in “(Quick), but it is wise to use fhe full version as it will verify the drive is ok. You can select one of the lower options. Use the arrow keys to select the proper one and depress <Enter>.
From here you are all set and the installation of Windows will proceed starting with a format of your drive. This will take a while (half hour to over an hour) so you can take a little break.
