Alright the first thing to be aware of is that I'm still young at the age of 15 so bare with me if at all possible.  I've got a Dimension 8300, purchased it last year in June I believe, and I've decided that I'd like to get everything on my disk---off.  So I decided to reformat.  I tried inserting my Windows XP Home Edition disk, and installing it however I get an error telling me that my version of windows currently installed is newer than the one on the disk, and that to install the disk version I'd need to restart and boot from the disk.

 

So I restarted, hit F12 for the menu and chose option number 4 which I believe was "IDE CD-Rom" or something very similar.  PC started up like normal.  So I went to the setup after another restart and set the boot drive order, told it to first boot from the CD-Rom then from the C: drive.  It started up just like normal anyway.

 

Now, I suppose the main question is am I even going about this properly?  And the second question would be if so, how do I get it to boot from the disk so I can reinstall windows and start over clean? 

 

Thanks for any help or advice.