Win XP booting sporadically

[Guest]

Hello:
My Win XP Pro is booting on occasion. It will boot ok in
safe mode. I booted in safe mode and ran my Spybot, Adaware,
and AVG. I use Zone Alarm as a firewall. Programs reported no
viruses. I set my bios to boot from the CD and tried to boot
up from my WinXP OEM disc but it does not boot from the OEM
disk. Is this normal? I booted in safe mode and inserted the
WinXP OEM disk and clicked on "clean install" to see if I could get a repair
option but I got a message that says it
cannot continue because my install copy of Windows is newer
than my install disk. I tried using system restore but it
will not succeed in restoring. I tried several different restore points. If
I can only do a clean install with my OEM disk, then how can I format my
disk? Or should I uninstall windows in the add/remove program? Your help will
be greatly appreciated. I do have all updates installed along
with SP2.
Thank You, Don

 

[george]

Your installation is newer (probably) because of fixes or service packs
installed (through Automatic update or manually)
The normal installation procedure should give you the option to (re)create
partitions and format them, in the initial text-setup portion. (Check the
options presented).
However, I can't tell you if, and if so, how much the OEM version you has
been customized.

 

[Guest]

Hi George:
Thanks for your response to my problem. The normal installation procedure
is not
giving me any options to create partitions or/and format them.The only
options I have are a clean install (which it will not do) or browse disk,
etc. The OEM disk is a stock WinXP Pro disk which contains only the windows
program. I bought the OEM
disk when I put this computer together.
Thanks again,
Don

 

[Alex Nichol]

Thanks for your response to my problem. The normal installation procedure
is not
giving me any options to create partitions or/and format them.The only
options I have are a clean install (which it will not do) or browse disk,
etc. The OEM disk is a stock WinXP Pro disk which contains only the windows
program. I bought the OEM
disk when I put this computer together.

You do it after booting the XP CD direct. Enter Setup, and after the
license agreement take New Install. When it asks you to confirm where,
hit ESC; then you can select and delete the current partition(s) and
make a new RAW one to be formatted at the next stage