I'm trying to help a FRIEND reinstall xp. Now normally this isn't a problem however.....I can not get her machine to recognise any cd drives. I have set CMOS to allow me to boot from A drive but I can not get the C: prompt as it says it's not a recognised drive!!!! How do I get to c: or get the *censored* thing to recognise the cd drive??You have to set the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM (D:).

(Floppy) A: is for Boot Diskettes, (HDD 1) C: is for when there is an operating system installed. Which there isn't, if you have formatted.If the C: drive is formatted to NTFS then your bootdiskette won't read it.

You should boot directly to the XP CD (Slipstreamed with SP2 if it isn't already)

Instead of changing the BIOS I just use the OLDBIOS bootdisk to re-direct the boot to the CD-ROM drive.

If you have a problem deleting old NTFS partitions you can use the DELPART bootdisk.

DELPART BOOTDISK  OLDBIOS BOOTDISK

XP Clean Installing
XP Compatability Test
XP Partition Management
XP Installing Recovery Console

RAM Knowledge Base
RAM And What it Does
RAM Virtual Memory Paging
RAM Reseating & Fitting PDF File

Processor Temperatures
Service Pack Slipstreamer
Power SUPPLY Wattage Calculator
Everest Home Edition Computer Diagnostic Program

EmpTemp
CCLeaner File Cleaner

User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool


Then when all is installed and to your liking MAKE a drive image of the C: drive partition after CLEANING up the drive...

"Run Disk Cleanup and remove all but the last restore point. See if your System Restore cache and Recycle Bin SIZE is set at a reasonable level (Say 1024Mb) on each drive, and reduce the IE Temporary Internet Files cache and History cache to the minimum. Install CCLeaner and clean out all of the junk files. Unhide all files and folders and remove the hotfix uninstallers ( $NTUninstaller$ ) from the hidden C:\Windows folder and remove their entries from Add-Remove programs. Then remove the contents of:

The C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Installations folder
The C: WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder
The C:\WINDOWS\Temp folder
The C:\Windows\pchealth\helpctr\Datacoll folder, and...
The C:\Windows\Prefetch folder

(You can add these folders to EmpTemp if you have this program installed.) Then run chkdsk and defrag."