formatted c drive, now nothing.

Please help me,

I have just formatted the c drive in an old computer and would like to install windows XP, But the problem i have is that the computer boots up to the stage where it says "Verifying DMI pool data........." then before anything else it states "Invalid system disk, replace the disk and press any key" so to this ive tried windows XP disk... no luck, so then i tried windows 98 start up floppy... once again no luck. So now i have no clue and am completly lost.

Any help would be very greatful

Go into the BIOS and set your computer to boot from cd then put your xp disc in and restart your computer, it should then come up with something saying 'press any key to boot from cd' do what it says and then the windows xp setup screen should load.

maybe you were missing the step where to need to hit any key.. have you set it up before?

thanks for the replies,

i have tried going in to the bios but it is asking for a password, being a secondhand computer i dont have it but it has been set up before (not by me though) to run windows 98.

reset the cmos. the pass will be removed in most cases. then do what you need to do to get windows to boot from cd rom first do the install then set it back to boot from hd..

thanks everybody for your help, reset cmos today before i got a chance to read your post cowkiller, but it did do the trick it is now up and running with XP... thanks all so much!

Im glad everything is sorted out.