I recently got a computer from a friend for free who couldn't get it to work. I found out the reason it wasn't booting was because A) There was no harddrive and B) There was a windows 98 update disk in the CD-ROM. I took an old harddrive I had lying around and put in the primary master slot. It has windows XP installed on it. When I start the computer it displays the Bios logo(award), displays some stats, and then displays a chart with the all the pci devices listed and then just stops with a blinking cursor and does nothing else. I have tried several different boot disks, - all which produce this same result. Questions are as follows: 1) Do I need to format the harddrive before I connect it to the computer-(the harddrive is full of crap and the bootsector is for another machine and could be corrupted )? 2) Is there a bootdisk out there that will allow me to boot, if so where? 3) How can I get an OS on this comp (I would like to install mepis)? Thanks.

Have you checked the BIOS to see what the boot order is? If you have the WinXP CD, you *may* be able to boot off the CD & do a "repair install" of XP http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_install.htm ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP2