is there anyone who can tell me how to format my hard disc without a floppy drive, ie reach command prompt. I am trying to take a spanish copy of XP out and put an English copy in. Also incase everything goes wrong i tried to make a Compaq copy of my system, as everything came bundled with no discs, but the computer doesn´t recognise the cd-rw drive. The computer is brand new with no changes. It is a compaq presario SR1829ES if that helps. Surely a new computer should know its own drives!!!!!!!!!!

why did you have no discs, did the PC not have a restore disc?

can you get into the BIOS and alter the boot order, so that it boots from CD before hard drive?

no discs came with the computer, you have to make your own. Thants Compaq for you. Unfortunately it won´t recognise the drive so I can´t make my own discs. I can boot from cd though. Will that work, is that all I need? Will that write over what I already have?

if you're going to do a clean install or a repair instalation like Here booting from CD should work as XP boots from CD

i´ve tried a repair any couldn´t change the language so i am going for a clean install. You reckon if I just insert the disc it should sort itself out?

yes XP boots from CD so you should be able to partition and format the drive before installing XP

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

I tried everything you said before and it didn´t like it It said something like i would over-write an os that is already installed and certain things would no longer work. This is why now I have borrowed a friends copy of XP that isn´t a service pack. It is a fully licensed genuine copy so i thought start from scratch. The only thing being i am going to lose a lot of programs like digital media plus etc because apparently the strings or something are to big or long to put on a cd. i am more interested in getting windows xp in english though

I don´t know if before, I was trying to change language with SP1a and I already have SP2 installed. Perhaps it didn´t like downgrading or something

sory another question, do i create a new partiton for the english XP and then go back and delete the Spannish XP one. And why am i getting all these strange characters up?

sorry didn´t realise you couldn´t see the odd charcters. Ignore the last comment, they just seem to come as you type but don´t come up online