I reformatte my comp to get rid of some viruses that no program I could find would get rid of, and now my win xp cd won't even recognise my c drive....

You can goto C:\> without ti telling you it's an invalid drive, but you can't do anything with it..

My boot disk will reformat it, but nothing else will access it..

:helpme: :nervous: :idunno: :helpme: ](*,) #-o :-k :bigcry: :helpme:

Sounds like it got corrupt. But I'm not too great with these types of things without being there in person.

/me waits for another

safe mode...reinstall the cdrom driver

1)is it a MS XP cd or a restore cd ?
2)how did your format ? via the xp cd or some othe way ? NTFS or fat32?
3)did you mess with the partitions at all ?
4)size of hdd ?
5) number and sizes of partitions?
6) brand of comp ?

[You can goto C:\> without ti telling you it's an invalid drive, but you can't do anything with it..] there is nothing on the drive [formatted] so just what do you expect.

XP full install CD
with 3rd person program on a bootdisk
yes
120Gb
1 - full size
HP Pavilion (modified)

Originally Posted by jazzman

safe mode...reinstall the cdrom driver

CD rom read fine, it's my HD..

Go into your bios....usually through hitting the "delete" key straight after booting....set the boot order to 1/CDROM 2/HDD then 3/Floppy.

Place your XP disk in the CDROM drive, shutdown, restart....do NOT touch anything.....until it tells youto....allow it to boot off the CD...

You are seeing the words "invalid" because it is looking at an empty drive, and not your CD ROM.

Hope that helps....

[with 3rd person program on a bootdisk} that could be the problem [my win xp cd won't even recognise my c drive] could be the parition type made was not FAT32 or NTFS.

With what ever programe you have delete all partitions on hdd and then reboot with the XP cd.
DO the new partitioning within XP, at least on primary partition set active.

Got it up and running.. The XP CD I have isn't retail, it's a copy of a friend's with my key. I think he'd modified it a bit though, cause whenever it'd boot fromt eh CD, it would fire up DR-DOS. I'd go into the I386 folder and run the Winnt.exe and that would start trying to install Win XP, but then i'd get the error. I have bios set to CD > HD, dont even have a floppy drive. I found my old Win 98 CD (retail) and poppedit in. IT WORKED!! I guess that 3rd party grogram I used on my bootdisc did format it wrong, cause after Win 98 formatted it, it worked fine. Now to upgrade to Win xp. :P :yippee: :banana: :thumbs: :freaksmi: :lol:

:lovefx: Also need to get it online so I can get Fire Fox back. :lovefx:

Originally Posted by Punchin

Got it up and running.. The XP CD I have isn't retail, it's a copy of a friend's with my key. I think he'd modified it a bit though, cause whenever it'd boot fromt eh CD, it would fire up DR-DOS. I'd go into the I386 folder and run the Winnt.exe and that would start trying to install Win XP, but then i'd get the error. I have bios set to CD > HD, dont even have a floppy drive. I found my old Win 98 CD (retail) and poppedit in. IT WORKED!! I guess that 3rd party grogram I used on my bootdisc did format it wrong, cause after Win 98 formatted it, it worked fine. Now to upgrade to Win xp. :P :yippee: :banana: :thumbs: :freaksmi: :lol:

:lovefx: Also need to get it online so I can get Fire Fox back. :lovefx:

Glad to hear you got it going again Punchin