well as a budding computer repair tech i decided to test my skills....and they backfired a little

woe #1...
after getting po/ed at my moms computer i decided i was going to install XP onto hers and make a nice clean slate, i couldnt get an XP startup disk to work at all, not sure why....and i couldnt get it to boot from the cd and nothing happened when i F12ed it....soo i decided to piggyback her hard drive onto my computer and install it that way...well that didnt work...now her HD is out of mine and everything is back to its original state...EXCEPT that every time i start my computer i have the option to choose to boot from one or the other HDs or to enter XP setup...how can i make this go away? i only havc on HD and one OS i obviously dont need that..

woe #2 how can i get XP to install on my moms computer? all i have is the XP disk that came with my Dell, from my understanding the Retail version comes with a bunch of floppies? can someone e-mail me the contents of these maybe? or am i even right? or will that disk even work with her computer? i cannot get a message saying "press blah blah to boot from cd, like i should be able too" instead it searches the floppy, cd, and hard drive then says "remove media blah blah" orsomething like that, if its really important i can go get the exact message.



thanks for the help that will follow, i have little experience with XP, my computer repair classes have been using 98 *eye roll*....but this will be one big learning experience. thanks a bunch

wow#2. I have two dells. Your XP Cd that came with (your) Dell will only work on that specific computer. What kind of computer does your mom have? I have a retail edition of XP home and all that is in the bos is the installation CD, no floppies. You have to go into your Dell BIOS and set the IDE-CD rom as the first boot device in order to do a clean install of XP. Here is a good link that may help.
http://www.djdenham.com/Install%20Procedures.htm

For woe#1 Control Panel -> System -> Advanced Tab -> Startup and Recovery -> You see that drop down menu at the top? See if you can find the os you want, and then /fast detect. Uncheck the box at the bottom if you are sure that is the os you want [my suggestion is to not do it right away, because you may not be able to boot]. If the OS you want is automatically highlighted when selecting one, then you can uncheck that box that says "Display a list of Operating Systems for x seconds."

Woe#2: Unless she has a dell, of same model as yours, that will not work. Don't even bother, you will probably screw up some major HD stuff if you try any harder. You would have to purchase a copy of windoze xp. <- Don't give money to microsoft.


-justin