Reinstallation Problem

[Jules]

I've been on this group back and forth all week because I
had made a huge mistake of deleting things in my
registry - thinking they were spyware when they weren't.
Anyways - the issue is this....ONCE AGAIN. Alot of good
people were giving me step by step instructions on how to
reinstall XP, and well...I couldn't get it going. Just
for some info...I have a Dell Demension Desktop, and Dell
provides you with a rebootable XP disc for reinstalling
and such, and I also have a regular XP disc - an official
one. So I go into BIOS and change the boot up to CD-rom
first, disable the others....start up the computer, with
the Dell XP disc...and it doesn't work. The CD won't boot
up. I keep getting some message about pressing F1 to
retry, or go back to the setup screen. Can someone
help...what the hell could I be doing wrong?

 

[Malke]

I've been on this group back and forth all week because I
had made a huge mistake of deleting things in my
registry - thinking they were spyware when they weren't.
Anyways - the issue is this....ONCE AGAIN. Alot of good
people were giving me step by step instructions on how to
reinstall XP, and well...I couldn't get it going. Just
for some info...I have a Dell Demension Desktop, and Dell
provides you with a rebootable XP disc for reinstalling
and such, and I also have a regular XP disc - an official
one. So I go into BIOS and change the boot up to CD-rom
first, disable the others....start up the computer, with
the Dell XP disc...and it doesn't work. The CD won't boot
up. I keep getting some message about pressing F1 to
retry, or go back to the setup screen. Can someone
help...what the hell could I be doing wrong?

Does your Dell have more than one cd drive? Are you putting the
operating system disk (the purplish one, not one of the blue ones) in
the wrong drive? You should get a prompt to "press any key to boot from
the cd". Press a key.

Malke