also another thing which might be important is the jumper settings at the back of your HDD, beside the power cable. if you're using the old ATA HDD you might have to set the jumpers to "Slave" settings or it might not work properly.

Hey, yeah I set the jumpers to slave, they were on cable select. All is good, transfered the files, now all I need to do is format the HD. I cant exactly remember how to do it. I searched DAL for a sticky on Formating and Starting again but I couldnt find it. Any help would be great. Thanks.
Dan

If its XP your installing then basically start the installation procedure by booting from the XP CD. Go through it all until where you have the option to delete current partition/OS on a drive, leave it intact or create another partition etc (you'll need the product activation key and remember any passwords if you set them). Choose the format completely option (you'll get a prompt telling you all will be deleted from it).
Then just carry on and install XP onto the HDD.

It might be a long wait. Here's a guide: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

Read it as its useful to know, especially the "XP Clean Install" for you.

I'm pretty sure (99%) that you can use any boot disk or installation CD/floppy (if you happen to still have floppys) to boot into DOS.


However the best way is to take a XP (assuming you were using XP) install disk and boot to it. When the option of where you would like to install (assuming you have multiple partitions) is to delete all of them and create one new one (or several depending on how many you want).

Okay, all done I saved the files I wanted on my PC then formatted the old one. Any alls good, thanks all of you for your help.
Cheers.
Dan

Thanks for the update and thanks.