my friend was running his computer without a firewall for 2 months or so, so i installed and ran AVG, it found thousands of corupted files, so it delete them and the computer failed to work, so i went to reinstall XP, it is a 3 month evaluation copy, just to get him up and running till he gets Vista, but something went wrong with the installation and now all it does when i put it on is it starts as normal, then after the XP is loading screen it goes black and says floppy diskette failure press F1 for continue or F2 for set up, if i press F1 all it does is reload to this sceen, if i press F2 it takes me to set up and i dont know what to do.
His computer doesnt have a floppy drive and it doesnt start in any of the safe modes, any help would be great, also i ran a hardware diagnostics and the hardware is fine

Did you reformat the hard drive completly? Is there anything pulged into the floppy disk header? It is usally located at the bottom of the motherboard. If not it sounds like you may have to do that.

he never formatted the hard drive for me tho he told me he did, so how do i format the drive from my current position? so do i need to plug something into the floppy disk port?

I am not sure an evaluation copy of XP will let you reformat - that may be intentional to prevent people from continually starting the evaluation over and over again, instead of purchasing a legal license. When you booted from the XP CD, you should have been given prompt to format the drives. Try that. If you can't, it's time to buy a legal copy, or go with a free alternative operating system, such as Linux.

Unless you are installing on to SATA drives, you should not need a floppy drive. I don't know why you would be getting a floppy error. You might try resetting the BIOS - check your motherboard manual for specific instructions.

he doesnt have the motherboard manual, also i cant do anything once it goes the the black screen, i can get into the bios and set up fine, but i dont know what to do from their, i just want to totally wipe the computer and install the evaluation copy of xp for the time being till he gets vista

A manual for nearly every motherboard can be downloaded from the motherboard maker's web site. You just need the make, model, and sometimes the version/revision number of the board.

Typically, once in the BIOS, you look at the boot order and put the CD Drive before the HD. Then, during boot, you will be prompted to press a key if you want to boot from a CD. You need to do that, and then follow the prompts to format the drive and install Windows, if it will allow you to do so.

However, evaluations copies of XP have a time limit built in to prevent folks from installing it over and over again. And since XP came out in 2001, I suspect that time restriction is long past. And rightfully so - it is not designed to allow folks to function indefinitely, just as a car dealer is not expected to let folks test drive a car to do daily errands for days on end.

Again, you need to purchase a legal copy of Windows. If that is not in the budget right now, then again, I suggest you go with a free alternative, such as Ubuntu 7.10.

I would advise against installing Vista on this machine. Vista should only be installed on brand new, or nearly new hardware.

Windows dose have a time limit. However you can have the CD forever and then install it and you get 120 days I believe. Like the full version the trial version comes with a license key in which you can use to upgrade to the full version. Like XP, Vista dose have minimum requirements for hard drive, ram and others. You can buy ram and hard drives fairly cheap in order to upgrade and make the system full compatible with Vista.

You can buy ram and hard drives fairly cheap in order to upgrade and make the system full compatible with Vista.

Ooooh, I would not go that far. Drive space and RAM is only part of it. You still need Vista compatible drivers for all your hardware, including the graphics and several motherboard components - and driver availability and support for legacy hardware is not a sure thing - by any means. I stick to and emphasize my previous comment - "Vista should only be installed on brand new, or nearly new hardware."

"... screen it goes black and says floppy diskette failure press F1 for continue or F2 for set up, if i press F1 all it does is reload to this sceen, if i press F2 it takes me to set up and i dont know what to do.
His computer doesnt have a floppy drive ..."

The bios is probably set up for a 3.5"/144MB floppy, and it's set to halt on all errors, or all except keyboard. It doesn't find the floppy which is listed as being there, hence it halts.

When you enter the bios set the floppy drive to NONE.

i have set floppy drive to none and the problem continues