So I've played with several different flavors of Linux, and decided it is time to put everything back to windows so I can go back to school online. Couldn't find my Compaq Presario cds, so I went out and bought a licensed retail version of XP. Threw the cd in, rebooted, and installed XP no problem. Now, I'm trying to do the same with my Sony Vaio laptop. It is fighting me all the way. It won't boot from a CD period. Vaio recovery CDs (that I burned the second day after I bought it) won't boot, and my new XP install CD won't boot. I have used Efdisk.exe to format the HD after DBAN didn't help. Now I have nothing. I can only get the Sony to boot to a MS-DOS floppy, and I can't see my C: drive or D: drive. How do I restore this thing? This will be my last Sony, of course, but would like to know how I can restore it back to Windows so that I can use it. Thanks in advance. -Jason

You need to alter what is called the "boot sequence" this tells the machine where to look for boot up information. (CD-ROM FIRST)
or you can use a floppy disk with cd rom drivers on it but you will have to format and partition your hard disk as it is probably an NTFS partition
Hope this helps
regards
Dave

I have tried that. I changed the bios to boot from cd only, and still no go. I used a program called part240.exe to format the HD to FAT 32. Maybe that's my problem. Does it need to be NTFS for XP?

I couldn't find a tool online to clean the HD back to NTFS, so I had CompUSA format the HD today. Still no luck. Recovery CDs just hang, and Windows install CD hangs for awhile, then says 'operating system not found.' Where to go from here?