I have installed windows vista ultimate in my laptop on drive c:. Now i am getting some probs with it and want to reinstall my xp on drive c & remove vista.. But wen i put xp cd in drive & start the pc.. directly vita os gets booted. It does not even show "press any key to boot from cd"..! I tried all the things, boot order is correct. Even i changed xp cd.. but no use. Also i booted from vista dvd ..formatted my c drive.. then took off vista dvd & insterted xp cd..! plz help me reinstalling my xp os.

Test CD in another known working computer, Just start it only, don't install anything. Guess you could test it in a virtual machine even. Some OEM cd's are meant to be run from other ways too. It may have never been bootable. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I have tested it many times. Offcourse my xp cd is bootable as i have installed xp using it many times..! But my probs is dat.. last time i installed vista on c: drive formatting & deleting xp on it. Now evn i tried from many other xp cds.. but my laptop is not booting using dat xp cd..?

In that case if the disk's ok, then you may have a problem with the drive. Have you got an external drive you can try booting from? "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."