Okay so the story is i got a new laptop and i wanted to format my old laptop's harddrive. now i have formatted and done the windows xp reinstall on other computers before so i thought i would run into no problems

the problem i am having is when i boot from the windows cd on startup to do the formatting, all it does is go straight into windows and doesnt go to the menu to reinstall, format, etc etc.

so am i missing something? i need help here, how do i format the harddrive if my windows disc from boot from cd just goes straight into windows?

thanks!

have you set the bios to boot to CD first?

I have tried that, i have tried it many a times. I go into my bios, go to the boot tab, scroll down to cd/dvd as a choice but when i try to select it, it does not change from harddrive and i have no idea why

any other ideas?

Does the computer contain a DVD drive or a regular CD drive?

the drive is a multi layer cd/dvd burner, basically a standard laptop disc drive

Are you sure you run the BIOS correctly? Usually there are instructions there how to move an item etc. Looks to me that either you don't do it right or you don't save the changes when you exit BIOS.

believe me im not daft, for some reason, in the boot section under the bios, it simply wont let me choose cd/dvd to boot from first, so i guess thats a problem all in its own and i have no idea why, ive never seen that before.

i even tried disabling the boot from harddrive to see if it would then boot from cd automatically but to no avail, with or without the windows disc in the drive, the system still boots straight to windows

so you can understand my total confusion.

i may just give up and just smash the hard drive

This post has been edited by brearc: Oct 7 2008, 02:07 PM

In this case you will probably need to rip the cd image of your xp disk, and burn that image back to a burnable DVD disc.

I do not know why and I cannot explain it but I have dealt many a time with DVD drives that simply won't boot from CD's regardless of Bios options and else. This is most likely the case.

"Skeptic" do you happen to know of a free iso burning software that is fully functional in ripping and burning?

There is no point in blaming the hard disk because it's surely not your problem.

Are you sure your CD drive is OK? can you test it by booting normally to windows and placing any disk in the drive to see if it's functioning? If it is, then your BIOS problem must be solved before anything else.

Do you have a floppy drive and is it the first boot option

Have you tried using a win98 boot floppy and use the with CDRom support to access the CDRom drive

If so change to the i386 folder and type winnt to start the process from the xp disk

http://www.bootdisk.com/

or

use a USB to IDE/SATA adaptor, take out the drive attach to a computer delete the partitions, create a fat32 partition format the drive using the /s switch and set active, copy the i386 folder to the drive, reinstall in the laptop, when you startup you will have a command prompt, change to the i386 folder and type winnt to start the process to install xp, once installed and drivers installed you can convert to NTFS if needed.

this way you dont need a CDRom drive to install xp.

This post has been edited by peter99: Oct 8 2008, 08:18 AM