I used a win ME. startup disk to fdisk and format my hard drive that had win XP home on it and all that went well untill i went to type in the command to run the setup for installing my XP home, I typed in E:/ setup and it said this program does not run in dos. E was my cd drive as it said when i restarted my PC. could it be the ME. startup disk should i try win 98 start up disk. Thank you for any help

boot to the xp disk....if you cannot then you can make boot disks from the cd...

You will get the same message using a win98 startup disk. This is because those startup disks really bring up DOS which is why you got the message. After you're done with the formatting the drive you wanted to, restart the computer but hold the delete key (at least that's what it is on my comp) so that your bios/boot settings comes up. Change the boot order so that the first thing it tries is a CD. Save the settings, exit, and restart. Now you can boot off of the XP CD. Run through the setup. When it's done and restarts, change the boot order back to the original (in the method as above). Now everything should be fine. Another way to do it is to create a boot disk for winXP (but if you choose this it you may need 2 disks; one for booting in DOS to do the format and one for XP). Go to www.bootdisk.com. Click the link for windows boot disk. Go down to where it says Windows XP Bootdisk Sets. Choose appropriate one.

You can use a Win9x bootdisk without any problems. You need to run winnt.exe in the I386 folder to do so. You will also need a file called smartdrv.exe on the floppy. Search www.google.com for smartdrv.exe To install boot using the bootdisk. Then at the a:\ prompt type smartdrv and hit enter. Then type e:\i386\winnt.exe and setup should start. Sandman