XP Nightmare

[Mark Adams]

thanks for the reply, am waiting for restore disk from dell

Make sure you get drivers for your machine as well. Some Dell computers
shipped with a separate disk for drivers, the disk they are shipping you may
not have them. Alternatively, you can download the drivers for your machine
to another computer and copy them to a flash drive. Use the flash drive to
copy them to your computer. Post back with the outcome of your reinstall.
Keep in mind that this will likely wipe out all the data on the drive. If it
hasn't been wiped already by your failed install attempts, you'd better
recover it now if you can.