Hello First timer here,

I am having problems installing windows xp professional and was hoping that you guys could help. My problem is that I use a win98 boot disk to start the computer with the windows xp disk in the drive... I then get to a command prompt just like dos and am not sure what to do here. I looked on a few websites and saw that I should type in stuff like smartdrv and then d:/i386 and nothing seems to be happening all I get is a invalid switch error when I type that in. Any Help would be appreciated.


*This is a computer that had a virus on it and I reformatted and am trying to put back on windows.

Enter BIOS setup when you power up. (That's usually done by pressing the Delete key while the memory test is onscreen, but the keypress may be different for your computer. Have a look around in the various menus and find the entries for 'Boot order' or 1st, 2nd etc Boot device. Change it so that CD-ROM is selected as 1st boot device. Pop the Windows Cd in the drive, save and exit from BIOS setup.

Watch the screen while it is rebooting. You will see a message "Press a key to boot from CD-ROM". Do so, and the Computer will boot into the setup routine to allow you to create partitions, format, install Windows etc etc.

It is not good practice to use a 98 boot diskette for installing XP. the 98 boot diskette only allows you to create FAT32 partitions for XP, not the NTFS partitions which XP natively uses.

Get rid of that 98 boot diskette if you're looking to install winxp pro. It wont be needed. All being well when you go to install winxp pro from the cd, it will partition and format your hard disk drive using the NTFS5 file system. As has already been said win 98 uses the FAT32 file system.

Check your boot priorites and ensure that your system is set up to boot from cd first and foremost. pop your cd into the cd drive and the restart your machine with the cd inside. from here follow the prompts on screen to overwrite any existing o/s's and install winxp pro. the whole install process will take about an hour roughly. could be more, could be less. different machines have different setups.

just as a note... when i installed winxp pro on my brothers machine it took just under 1 hour including formatting and setting up different passwords.

use as a guide.:-|

i also have no probs with the machine operating winxp pro apart from the odd program crash. every1 gets that though

This is only ever a procedure followed if the desire is to perform an 'upgrade' install of Windows XP. Although Microsoft encourages people to 'upgrade' in this way, it is NOT good practice to do so. Loading a new version of Windows over the top of an old one inherits and magnifies any existing problems on the system.

By far the best procedure to follow is to back up data files, wipe the hard drive clean and install Windows XP on a newly created NTFS partition. The installation routine itself enables you to delete existing partition(s) create a new one(s) in its place and the installation will format the partition for uyou when this is done.

exactly what i was aiming to say but depending on what the chap wants to do. the instructions/prompts are there, you just select what you wanna do and do it, but make sure u do it right