[Howco]

Purchased used Dell PP01L laptop with XP Pro installed. Every reformat attempt I've tried has always booted to the installed XP's administrator and password menu, (I do not have either). I do have a Vista install CD, but when booting from that CD, I do not get the setup menu, I get the result above. I've even tried some hacking routines. Help
Thanks: Howco

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What do you mean by "reformat attempt"? What exactly have you tried and what happened.

If you don't have a XP install CD then how are you trying to reformat the drive and if you succeed, wghat will you do next if you don't anything to install?

What is the full model number: Dell Latitude PP01L xxxx??? It's possible it has a recovery partition on the hard drive you can use to restore it to factory new state.

[Ztruker]

What do you mean by "reformat attempt"? What exactly have you tried and what happened.

If you don't have a XP install CD then how are you trying to reformat the drive and if you succeed, wghat will you do next if you don't anything to install?

What is the full model number: Dell Latitude PP01L xxxx??? It's possible it has a recovery partition on the hard drive you can use to restore it to factory new state.

[Howco]

The Laptop came with XP-Pro installed. At first I wanted to get into Windows and revise Admn. and password. XP-Pro is too protected for my skills to hack into. My next thought was to wipe the hard drive clean, and install an earlier version of XP wihout the service packs, (I had the install CD). The nuances of XP-Pro would not allow me to do that, sinse it was an upgraded version of XP. My last resort was to install Vista, which I hate. I may reinstall XP, if I get the time, now that I do have acess to windows. All in all, it was a good learning experience for me.

Howco

[Ztruker]

Ah, okay. Follow the directions here to do a Clean Install of XP

The key is to boot from CD, not try to run it from a booted system, as JiniOnline was suggesting. Press the key needed to get into BIOS Setup, usually F2 for a Dell. Move to the Boot tab and make sure the CD drive is set as the first boot device. Save the changes.

Put your XP install CD in the CD drive and reboot the computer. Follow directions from the link above.

Once you have XP installed, the first thing you should do is install SP2 then SP3.

You can download SP2 .exe here: Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers

You can download SP32 .exe here: Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers

Next install all Updates, currently 116 on top of SP3.

Once that's done then install Microsoft Security Essentials for your Anti-virus. Then start installing any software you want.

Also, please post the full model number. I'd like to check the users manual to see if your computer should have a recovery partition or not. If it does then restoring to factory new state is easy and quick. If not then the above steps should get you going.