Windows XP recovery on new HD

[Bob Dredge]

Hi all,

I hope someone can help me out. I have a 1.5 year old E-
machines that was running Windows XP Home Edition until
the OEM hard drive crashed. I purchased a new hard drive
and installed and tried to use both a Windows 98SE boot
disk and a Windows XP boot disk to load the recovery CDs
that came with the E-machines. The Windows XP boot disk
will not accept the recovery CDs; it will only accept a
new Windows XP Home Edition CD. Windows 98SE boot disk
says the HD needs to be partitioned and formatted, but
then won't let me partition or format. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Bob

 

[Al S]

Get into your BIOS at startup and change the boot sequence to start with the
cdrom. WinXP will then boot and in the install you will be able to partition
your HD. When u r done with the install remember to go back into BIOS and
change back to the original setting.
Al

 

[Alex Nichol]

I hope someone can help me out. I have a 1.5 year old E-
machines that was running Windows XP Home Edition until
the OEM hard drive crashed. I purchased a new hard drive
and installed and tried to use both a Windows 98SE boot
disk and a Windows XP boot disk to load the recovery CDs
that came with the E-machines. The Windows XP boot disk
will not accept the recovery CDs; it will only accept a
new Windows XP Home Edition CD. Windows 98SE boot disk
says the HD needs to be partitioned and formatted, but
then won't let me partition or format

1. The CDs from eMachines ought to be bootable themselves. The normal
way to install XP is by setting the boot order in the machines BIOS
setup to CD before Hard disk. This means entering BIOS Setup at boot,
with whatever hot key, and changing in either BIOS settings or a
separate Boot section, depending on the machine. Then Esc out of the
page and take Exit - Saving settings.

2. If it positively will *not* boot a CD, then the tool on the 98 boot
floppy is FDISK. Use it to delete the 'non-DOS partition (if as seems
likely that is NTFS) and make a new DOS Primary one to reboot and
FORMAT C:. But this will most probably not work with the eMachines CD's
setup