The installation disc is all you need. Make sure you can boot from the CD:

Start your computer with the XP CD in the disc drive, on the Dell logo screen press F12 to get to the boot menu, then select your CD rom as first boot and press any key to boot from CD.

Print out the instructions in the link below first though.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp

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@joyabird wrote:
Gary is right, depending on your machine you may need to hit F12 or F2. On my Dimension it's F12 to enter the Boot Menu, F2 to enter the Bios Setup.

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If you do have any problems in the future and need to reinstall xp, you would want to do a clean reinstall. I always advise people if they don't want to run into the same problems, they perform a clean reinstall. So just incase and for anyone who wants to reformat their hard drive and do a clean reinstall, I'll give you the step by step instructions. Now you will loose all your data unless you save it to disk first. Erasing and reformatting your hard drive will get rid of all the crud that would normally be there after doing a basic fast reinstallation of xp. So the steps to reformat your hard drive:

1. diconnect from the internet and disable your internet connection.

2. insert the Dell Deminsion Resource CD - Drivers & Utilities.

3. restart your computer and when it first starts up again, hit F12 or F2 in some cases.

4. you should be given choices then.. now select #4 - Open a DOS

5. D:\csd> should appear

6. type the word "debug" and hit enter . avoid the quotation marks and period

now type the following. If you notice the first part is already showing, then type the remaining; such as if it shows -F already and you are to type -F 200 L1000 0, then only type the 200 L1000 0 not the -F if it's already showing. Now here's the following which should appear on your screen .. just follow it and type what's required:

-F 200 L1000 0 (hit enter) 0 is the #, not the letter

-A cs: 100 (hit enter)

254D:0100   mov ax,301 (hit enter) *there's a space between the mov and ax,bx,etc

254D:0103   mov bx,200 (hit enter)

254D:0106   mov cx,1 (hit enter)

254D:0109   mov dx,80 (hit enter)

254D:010C  int 13 (hit enter)

254D:010E   int 20 (hit enter)

254D:0110  (hit enter again)

-g (hit enter)

Program terminated normally.

Now you will want to take out the Dell Resource CD and put in the windows XP cd and restart your computer.

Now you will be reformatting your drive. Just follow the steps it tells you and the website someone above in this forum suggested would an excellent site to use for the step by step with reinstalling xp: winsupersite dot com.

When you've completed the step by step for reinstalling xp, you will want to install your drivers. There's a specific order you need to do that in:

First restart your computer and insert the Dell Drivers & Utilities Cd:

1. Install Chipset Drivers then restart

2. Install Video Driver then restart

3. Install  Audio Driver (which may be on the creative Cd instead) then restart

4. Install Network Driver (on the Dell Drivers & Utilities Cd) then restart

5. Install the Modem Driver (which is usually on a diff cd) then restart

after that,  I would check for all windows updates.

Message Edited by axiom21 on 01-23-2004 08:47 PM