Hi and thanks for reading this and helping in advance. I was just bought the laptop and the xp was upgraded to seven and\or vista...I think both, which is why I tried to re-format the drive to get a fresh install and re-build from there. Unfortunately the format program is getting stuck at 12 percent. Tried ntfs and fat32 formats to no avail. Same problem with both. I have no recovery disks but have a working desktop running xp pro which is what the laptop is supposed to be running. Have a fresh disk of xp pro aswell but will not take either. says txtsetup.sif ??? I think??? is bad ????? PLEASE HELP!!!

If you have no recovery discs, what is it you are using to install from?
You are booting to CD/DVD, not running it from a booted XP/Vista system, right?

Sounds like there may be problems with the hard drive. What is the make of the hard drive on your computer? You should be able to download a drive utility from the manufacturers web site to check out the drive. If it's a Toshiba drive then you're out of luck as they don't have one.

You could also give DBAN a try. You can create a bootable diskette, USB Flash drive or CD from the zip file you download.

Boot it and enter autonuke when prompted. If you have a large hard drive this can take a long time to run, so overnight might be a good idea.

If DBAN won't complete then you can try a program like SpinRite, though it's not free (around $90). Would be cheaper to buy a new hard drive.

After that, boot your install CD/DVD. Create a partition (it will be raw after DBAN runs, totally unpartitioned or formatted) then try formatting and installing there.

Note: DBAN will wipe out everything on the drive, completely.