Hello, I have an HP Pavillion 360n which came with xp home ed. installed. I also have system restore discs (that I had to purchase from HP as they don't supply them due to the "hidden" restore partition). Anyway, what I wanted to do was reformat my hard drive (c:) (had a virus and most of my programs were corrupted) using a Win98se bootdisk but to my surprise (ignoramus) I was unable to it because the drive is formated as NTSF. So, I deleted the partitions (fdisk showed that I had two: ntsf and a non-dos partition) and created new ones, c: and d: using fat32. After all this was done I tried to install XP Pro first by inserting the cd and rebooting the pc (went into BIOS and put cd-rom first) but that didn't work. So I went back into DOS using the win98se boot disk and tried to run set up -- f:setup -- but that didn't work. I also did f:dir to see if the cd-rom drive was reading the disk or not and yes, the directory shows up. So, if everything is formated and I have the partition, why can't I instal XP Pro? So in order to have a functioning computer, I used the system restore cd's that I have and the cd-rom drive reads them w/o a problem. Please help!! I don't want to restore my system with the recovery disks because they install a whole bunch of junk that I have never used and have to delete it manually.

Windows XP must be installed by either booting from the CD or from the Windows XP Setup Disks. It can't be installed after booting from a Win98 bootdisk. HTH Dave

Oops, I misread your post. The link above is for WinXP HOME Edition setup disks. You need the WinXP PRO Setup Disks. HTH Dave

the problem with useing a manufacture built pc to install software other then what is ment for it is that sometimes some companies, i dunno if yours is one, will not let anything work on their computers that was not sold by them, how they do it i dunno, but i know they do. you will also have to make sure your bios are up to date to use xp correctly, that might be a problem, other than that i wouldn't have a clue, good luck though