My apologizes for the LACK of grammar Ok here's the deal i know it has to do something with the virus i had i got out of bed the other day and turned the computer on when it got past the F12 or Del page it brought up all that ladida with the this could have been caused by a blackout out or whatever it has 5 options. Start in safe mode. Start in safe mode with networking. Start in safe mode with command prompt. Start with your last working configuration. Start windows normally. Now i've tryed all of them and each one moves on to the windows Xp loading bar and when it should move to the accounts page it restarts the entire computer SO! I tossed in my windows xp home edition cd and hit F12 when it told me to started with CD-Rom it loaded up all the stuff and it had. Press Enter to reformat. Press "R" to repair. Press F3 to exit (Or something along those lines). So i pressed enter went through the agreement thing and then it brings up. "Setup cannot find a previous version of Windows installed on your computer. To continue, Setpu needs to verify that you qualify to use this upgrade product. and so i hit enter and then... it says please wait... and then it says "loading information file .dosnet" which is only a quick flash so im not sure if there the exact words... then it goes back to the other screen and says. "Setup could not read the CD you inserted, or the CD is not a valid Windows CD" (The CD doesn't even have 1 scratch on it or handmark) So please any and all suggestions would be overwhelmingly appreciated as i have nothing to lose as you can see :P and everything to gain. Its not over heated either as i left it off for the last 2 days to make SURE it wasnt overheating. And im positive that theres nothing wrong with the hardware.

""Setup cannot find a previous version of Windows installed on your computer."" Is it a SATA hard drive? If it isn't your hard drive is probably dying. If it is, Windows XP Setup does not have the drivers built in for almost all SATA hard drive controllers and will not find a SATA hard drive in that case. You must boot with the CD again and press a key very early in the loading of the files from the CD when you see "Press Fx to load drivers for SCSI controllers" or similar, then point Windows to the location of the drivers on a floppy disk that has them. If your laptop did not come with such a floppy disk, the utility to make one may be on the CD that came with the computer, or in the downloads for your model on the Acer web site, or in the downloads of the main chipset maker (e.g. Intel) or the SATA hard drive controller chip maker. If you don't have a floppy drive, your're probably out of luck unless you can install a regular one - Setup will not look on a CD or a hard drive or a USB drive for the drivers, and will only recognize a USB connected floppy drive if it is one of a few models available when XP was first put together, none of which are available new now. Are you using the software install that was originally installed on the computer? If you are, did this laptop come with a single Recovery disk, or can you get one from the Acer web site? - if you can use that it probably has the SATA drivers already built in and will it will find the SATA drive automatically. However, many recent laptops don't come with a Recovery disk - there is a utility provided by the builder on the computer to make one, or to make a Recovery disk set, while Windows is still working fine. If you have a SATA drive but no floppy drive, it would be far easier to test the hard drive first. If the hard drive is physically no good there's no point in trying to fix the data on it. Check your hard drive. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to. ""Setup could not read the CD you inserted, or the CD is not a valid Windows CD"" (The CD doesn't even have 1 scratch on it or handmark)" You are getting read errors. Is it an original or a burned copy? If it is a copy, it is most likely to work fine if it is a CD-R - if that's not what it's on, you may need to copy it to a CD-R. Try a laser lens cleaning CD in the drive. Much less likely, Windows Setup is very picky about even slight ram reading errors when you run it from the CD - See response 2 in this - try cleaning the contacts on the ram modules. http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... In the case of a laptop, you must remove both the main battery and the AC adapter when you do that.