xp format...problem

[Gena]

My problem is: Had a 2 yr old refurbished compaq, motherboard went bad. So I bought new motherboard(ECS RS400-A). And a p4 3.0. New box. Had a friend (who is out of town) put it togther. Yes he does know what he is doing. OK never had a disk for any of it,yes it is legal copy of windows.

the computer will boot to cdrom put does not show in my computer as being there. reading old stuff from old motherboard. I need to reformat but it is not letting me.I am on the computer now but very slow and using onboard graphics. Is there a walkthrough for reformatting? I have reformatted before but that was in dos never done it with XP. Thanks for any help

[doubledragon5]

Make sure your boot sequence in bios is set to read from cdrom first... Then before rebooting insert your XP CD.. When the machine starts to reboot it will say " Hit any key to start from CD". From there it will inspect your hardware configuration and start loading drives needed to set up windows... Next it will detect your current version of windows.. Choose delete the partition. when done you will have to create another partition, then format it and you will be ready to reinstall a clean copy of windows....Hope this helps

[Panama Red]

Boot to the XP cd and do a repair/install. That will clear all the old hardware drivers and give you an opportunity to use the CD that should have come with the new mobo to install the new drivers.