Hello. I have a serious problem in that I seem to have wiped the entire hard drive on my computer (not this one, obviously). I want to try to reinstall the Op Sys disks, but I just get A: and flashing cursor as if it is waiting for a prompt. I don;t know what it is waiting for...have tried "enter", "start", "run" with a boot floppy in, but nothing happens. Also, as this happened by mistake (someone suggested I use a dos del command!) I don;t even know if I have the right floppy. Can someone give advice as to how to recover from this situation?

Put your windows floppy start disk in and at the A:\ prompt type 'setup' and enter. Then follow instructions, I can't remember but if it asks if you want CD ROM support say yes. M

There will be six floppy disks involved if this is indeed an XP install not one boot floppy - or you could try booting from the XP CD? If you can't then you can re-generate the floppy disks from the following place : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310994

I don't know if you could see it now, but on the top right-hand corner of your post, there's an orange box reading data recovery software and has a link to runtime.org. If that helps at all, I thought I'd point it out to you. ER4S3R. ____________________________________________ ### Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source ###

Thanks for the replies. I will try the setup thing. Is this the normal dos command for reading something in the A drive? I'm not sure if I still have all disks I need as I didn;t foresee this happening (yeah, I know, I know...). Oh, and nothing seems to happen with the CD drive when I put anything in it.

To boot from the Windows XP CD you need to enter the BIOS Setup and make sure you select boot from CDROM.

Ignore response #1. That won't work. Boot from The XP CD. Follow egkenny's instructions.