My brother's computer became completely unfunctional, and I believe it was a problem with his hard drive. I had one in my computer that I never used so I gave it to him. I reformatted the drive and set up two partitions: one 10gb partition and one 47gb partition using the Windows XP Professional installation CD. I began to install Windows and it all went smoothly until it said it would reboot and continue the installation after the reboot. (I'm assuming this is normal, but if not, let me know. There weren't any error messages.) But after the reboot it just booted from the CD again, as if I had just gone back in time and had never began installing Windows. But when I try to run the recovery tool (one of the main options after the CD boots up,) it goes into DOS mode and shows the C: drive as C:\WINDOWS> and never just C:. How do I continue the installation?

There was an earlier episode when I was trying to freshen up my own computer. My dad ended up taking over the Windows installation process. I heard many angry "AAARRRGHHHH"s over the weekend. After he finally finished he said he'd had to install Windows 98SE (which I still have a copy of) then upgrade to Windows XP Professional. My brother's hard drive is currently reformatting again as I type this. Should I try going straight to Windows XP again or install 98 then upgrade to XP? Will it make any difference as far as the hard drive space taken up?

When it says 'Boot from CD...' are you hitting a key to boot from it? If so, don't, just wait a few seconds and the installation SHOULD continue, hope this works.

the bios is set to boot from the floppy, then the hard drive (ide 0), then the cd-rom in that order. it successfully boots from the CD, but it doesn't resume the installation

There should not be a restart during installation. Just after it is done.

Set the CD-ROM to boot before the hard drive.

If your XP CD is an Upgrade Version then you will need your 98 disk just to verify a previous Windows. Otherwise there should be no reason to install 98.

This is a good install guide:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/index.html

Let us know if you have any further questions.