I'm trying to help a friend. She has Windows XP Professional - rest of spec not known. Windows splash screen appears then a black and white screen advising that Windows did not load properly. None of the options on that screen will work - will not start in Safe Mode or Safe Mode with command prompt. Looks as if O/S is corrupted, particularly as children have been downloading from Limewire. I want to reformat hard-drive and do a clean reinstall of Win XP. However, although I've put a bootable floppy into the floppy drive, I get the error messsage 'Flopp not found'. The floppy drive is physically present and the green light come on when computer is switched on. I have checked the connection of the floppy to the motherboard. Any other suggestions I could tyr would be appreciated. I've set the boot sequence so that it reads from the floppy first.

Windows XP CD's are bootable and partioning and formatting can be undertaken during installation. Floppy not required.

yea you dont to use the floppy disk. the cd is good enough. unless you install win98.

You do NOT have to format...just boot off the CD & do a "repair install" http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...

the Floppy disc isn't needed, but somethings you could try is checking to see if the BIOS menu has it set. You want it set on 3.5inch 1.44MBs for a standard Floppy Drive. The green light always on most always means you have your ribben cable installed back words. There should be a twist on one end of the cable. Turn that twist to the other side (like if it was on the side of the Mother Board connect it to the Floppy.) Also your cable could be bad. Most new Mother Boards do not support a ribben cable with more then one connector. Try these steps and see what happens if you still need your floppy drive.

As already mentioned, you can boot from the CD. Just make sure the cdrom comes before the hard drive in the boot order. Also is the error message you're getting using the bootdisk telling you it can't find a floppy drive or is it saying it's not detecting that the disk in it is a bootable disk? If it's not detecting the drive you should be getting the message whether there's a disk in it or not.