Hi Guys, just trying to pick your brains. My wifes just been given a pc from a friend but has apparantly previously had an illegal copy of xp pro installed. The harddrive has been formatted so at boot up it goes for an xp insall and asks for the disc which we dont have. I do however have a disk for xp home for my laptop. Is there anyway i can reformat the HD on my wifes pc before xp tries to intall so i can install xp home. Can get into bios and a sort of dos menu but cant run in safe mode without xp running. Suggestions welcome as its driving me mad. cheers.

Go into your bios and make sure that the CD is the first device to boot.

Pop in the XP Home CD and it should boot up (or ask you if you want to boot from CD - Yes). Then you need to delete any existing partitions (part of the setup process). MAKE SURE YOU'RE HAPPY TO LOOSE ANYTHING ON THIS PC!

The rest should be self explainatory.

DW.

Thanks Darkwing,
Took a couple of goes but worked a treat. many thanks.