I have/had another thread about this when I just couldnt get my Compaq laptop to bot into XP Pro after instaling it. It worked once then I shut it down and it never started again! If you want to read wat has allready been said the title is XP wont boot up????? and it was started on the 16 of April so irs on like page 7 or something now. Any way since then I have inserted an extra 128Mb of RAM system was originaly running just 64Mb and that was thought to be one of the possiblities to why it wasnt working. I am still having the same problems. I have decided that I wasnt to wipe the disk again and start a clean install of XP Pro. I have put the dick in the drive but it doesnt cocognise it and when starting up pushing F2 doesnt bring up BIOS so I cant see if CDRom is selected! So i want to wipe the disk and start a fresh! theres is nothing on the laptop anyway. Hoow can I do this? and does any one have any suggestions of how I get into BIOS to see if CD ROM is selected as I am continueing to try and get it to work with the current install, but am stuch for ideas, thanks for anything you can suggest!

watch the screen as you boot up it is usually DEL you have to hit to enter the bios. It may be real quik but it will tell you what to push..IF you get ready and hit shift and puuse you can pause the boot up to give you time to read what it says (so you can find what to enter bios with.. But yea its usually Delete..but there are varients.. But work out your boot order before you whipe your drive.. Oz "Bite off more than you can chew, And chew like hell!" Peter Brock.

Putting the "dick" in the drive is not a good idea for a start... (sorry about this I couldn't help myself heh heh) Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!

disc disc disc dam i realy need to proof read beofre i click ok and man that would be dangerous and sore!

trust me it doesnt say anything beacuse it doesnt get that far into booting up!(not even a flash) I only get the compaq sign then straight into black screen. l gave it ago (pushing delete) but no luck the only menu I can seem to acces is the F8 menu wat else can I do? and how do I go about deleting the hard drive and starting again?

get yourself a 98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com (when you get there download to your desk top put a blank floppy in the drive , double klik the icon and this will creat a 98 boot disk for you). put it in the a drive and boot up type setup.exe hit enter (with your xp disk in the drive). see how that goes and post back Oz "Bite off more than you can chew, And chew like hell!" Peter Brock.

I don't think Compaq use the 'Del' key to access BIOS - I've got a feeling it's F1, or maybe F10 - I know it's an unusual one. Once in the BIOS choose floppy as your first boot drive.