ok... so my friends wanted a full system format on their comp... so i back up all their stuff, and get out the windows boot disk that came with their dell. i put it in, and it comes up with a thing asking me what i want to do, i select new installation, and run through all the blahty blah... finally an hour or so later we get into windows, and all the old user accounts are still on,i dont think the hard drive is partitioned... but when we restart the comp, we get a prompt asking what os we want to load, and it has win xp and win xp and when i go to the bottom one it says that it cannot load for some reason or another, but we tried restarting with the boot disk not in and in, and it gives us the same message for that one, and the old user accounts are still on there... what do i do? can someone walk me through an entire system format, so i can figure out what i did wrong? thank you all alot in advance. i really appreciate this.

With the Dell disk, you are not doing a complete format. The Dell disk allows you to do a sort of copy over on the system so that's why the old user info is still on the disk. The HD is usually divided into 2 partitions from the factory. C (boot) and D to store backup info. I wouldn't do a clean install unless you have a Win XP cd. To get rid of the dual boot option, open windows explorer and on the C drive find the Boot.ini file. Open it and delete the second Win xp entry, probably on the D drive. Good Luck.

so will we need to buy a new win xp disk, or can we use the one i used to put on my computer, back when i had win me? ::shudder::

Is it an upgrade disk or a full version???

full version home edition

like...can i do the format with my disk, and then install xp with their disk?