ok heres my problem. I wanted to reformat windows so I went into "windows xp proffesional setup"(booted to recovery disk).I have 2 internal hard drives, so I deleted them both. then I installed windows on 1 of them and turned the other into a partition. after I turned the second drive into a partition and pressed f3 to exit, I got the message... "Windows XP is not completly set up on your computer. If you quit setup now, you will need to run setup again to set up windows XP. >to continue setup press enter >to quit setup, press F3" , so I just thought thats weird and exited because I knew I had installed windows on the first drive. everything works fine except when I restart the computer without the recovery disk inside, before windows starts I get the message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". if I go into "windows xp professional setup" and then press f3 to exit it gives me the message "Windows XP is not completly set up on your computer. If you quit setup now.......". What is wrong and how do I fix it? I could just change my boot order, but Im concerned this might be causing my computer problems that I cannot see. Another thing I wanted to know.. Is what I did supposed to work? Because Im not very experienced with reformatting computers.

hi, you may have to go into you bios, and change the boot order like you mention before. And set it to the memory hard disk that has windows on it, leave the disk out and boot the computer, if you still have it asking for the xp disk, put it in and complete the setup. that should be the last time you need to format it. In future you may be better to format it through command prompt if you plaaning just to format it, it would be best to follow the troubleshoot

Basically all you did was create two partitions and then exited setup. Windows was not installed on the drive and you will need to boot the install cd and select the partition you want windows to be on and then press enter to continue the setup. You should see a splash screen with MS logo and it will take about 40 min's or so for the files to be copied to the hard drive.