hi i know a lot of people wrote about this but this is a little different. i was running windows 98 on a l433c dimension celeron dell. it got terrible slow and i wanted to install windows xp which i bought for it. however i first formatted the c drive ( format c: in the command prompt) and now i get an "invalid system disk" error and i am not able to boot up the windows xp cd or windows 98 bootable cd that i made because i dont have a workable floppy drive. i also see no way to get to the "command prompt." i have also changed the BIOS settings so "atapi cdrom" would boot first. i have looked all over the internet for an answer to this. any ideas? thanks so much in advance!

Win98 probably got "terrible slow" because it was loaded with all sorts of garbage. WinXP is gonna run "terrible slow" because you have a crappy 433MHz Celeron & I'm guessing you don't have enough RAM. 256MB will be slow, anything less would be a complete waste of time. Your system supports up to 512MB (2 x 256MB). I suggest you max it out or you're gonna be very disappointed with the XP performance. As for the installation, there was no need to format any other way than with the XP CD. Since you said you switched the boot order, so all you have to do is boot off the WinXP CD & take it from there. There is a prompt that comes up on the screen that says something like "press any key to boot off the CD....", it *may* be hidden behind the Dell splash screen. If you don't press a key at the right time, it won't boot off the CD.

thanks for the reply. for some reason i am still not able to boot off the cd is goes straight to that error. i tried F12 F8 and other keys but it just doesnt boot. any more ideas? thanks so much!

You probably don't have a good boot able WinXP CD.

"i am not able to boot up the windows xp cd or windows 98 bootable cd that i made " A genuine XP cd will boot, if it is a proper XP disk and you are having a problem, have you disabled the Dell splash screen in bios so you can see the boot screen?

no i havent. how do i do that? thanks! but will a real xp cd boot even on my older computer running windows 98?

As long as the cd is bootable, the cdrom is set as the first boot device and the cdrom and cd are good then you can boot from the cd. It doesn't matter what OS you previously were running. I've noticed some bios' where a boot device can be disabled even though it shows in the boot sequence. Check that in cmos/bios setup. There should be something like 'enable diagnostic screen' when booting in cmos/bios setup. Do that and it'll get rid of the dell logo. You can also hit a key--usually TAB--to show the diagnostic/posting screen. If you still can't get it to boot, the solution may be to just get a working floppy drive.