How would I go about installing XP on my friend's computer? He has Windows ME, and I guess a virus or something, but now when you try to boot, normal or safe mode, it either crashes before anything loads, or says "Windows has found the following new hardware:" but lists nothing. It says you need to find the drivers... we manually tried every folder we could, nothing. At one point, it said something like, "You need the following drivers:" and again, listed nothing. Even in normal mode, the color is low-quality, as if in Safe Mode. And as soon as we cancel the "new hardware" thing, it either crashes, or nothing loads at all. The Ctrl+Alt+Del menu is blank. He has a disk to boot into DOS, and we used that, but we can't get XP to install. We tried running setup.exe, but it said this type of program could not be run in DOS mode. Any suggestions? What I was thinking was, I could bring my hard drive over, install it as C:, and his current one as D:, and if I did that... is there any way to install XP on the D: drive, without erasing anything on C:? Thanks a lot, Johnathan

Hi, No, you can't install XP on another PC and then transplant the drive. Actually, you can but you'll have a mess. Look here: http://www.hexff.com/win98_install.php M2

You need to determine if your friend's system has some kind of hardware fault first. Download a harddrive diagnostic tool from the harddrive maker and test his drive for integrity. Next you need to determine if the system is even XP compatible. Does it meet minimum XP requirements? Next you need to decide if the drive contains any files that you need to keep. If it does then you could take his drive and instal it as slave in your machine to try to recover any files. Once you've completed that then you should format the drive and return it to the machine it came from. Xp is not loaded from DOS. The XP disk is bootable. Just set bios to boot from CD first and insert the XP disk. Reboot and follow the prompts. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

Hi Richard, Goo stuff. While we're on the subject, not meaning to split hairs, but doesn't XP/2k need to have a viable FAT partition to start the install? It seems to need someplace to put files. Am I missing something here? TIA M2

No. Xp can start with a raw drive and has all the partitioning and format tools inbuilt in the setup files. It can be installed in either fat32 or ntfs. If you want a dualboot system with either 98 or ME as the other system then the 9x system should be installed first in a fat32 partition. XP is installed last into another partition which can be either fat32 or NTFS. During the setup process XP will lodge it's bootfiles in the root of the C drive while creating the dualboot menu and boot.ini. Similarly it is possible to create a dualboot system with say 2k and XP both in NTFS partitions,or with XP in it's own FAT32. In either case XP adds it's bootfiles to the NTFS partition that contains 2k Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

Okay, how exactly do I format it? format C: /s right? Will it work, or will there be errors? Will that work on the DOS disk he has, or do I need a special kind, since he's on ME? Another thing... "Download a harddrive diagnostic tool from the harddrive maker and test his drive for integrity." Where, exactly? What I would do is see what company his hard drive was made by and download anything available... I won't be back at his house until tomorrow, though. Do I save it to a floppy disk then boot it the same way with the DOS disk, or what? Thanks.

Richard, OK, I learned something here. I did a few installs recently and they wouldn't "go." But maybe there were other probs. M2