[dobbler98]

Hello all. I have a new HP that came with Vista Home Pro (or whatever) preinstalled. I made the system recovery disks in case I ever want to return it to factory state. I have an office network running XP and am not impressed with Vista; I want to install XP.

The HP didn't come with a floppy drive, so I made a Win98 boot cd to be able fdisk etc. and then install XP Pro SP2 to the now blank hard drive. Problem is, the cd won't boot so I'm stuck. Any suggestions on how to go from here? Thanks in advance.

[lildragon]

You might want to read this before dowgrading to XP. Also Win 98 is not compatible with NTFS file structure so you will not have access to the NTFS partitions through a Win 98 boot CD. Do you not have a XP install CD?

[dobbler98]

Oh yes I know all that...lol. as mentioned above I made the recovery disks just in case and the drivers aren't an issue.
The HP wouldn't boot with the XP disk...it keeps giving me the system error blue screen of death so I was just going to use fdisk to blank the drive and then reformat in NTFS. I'll be honest with you I've never encountered an OS which simply refuses to let you kill it....lol.

[dobbler98]

Well I got it. boy you talk about frustration! I never did get the darn thing to boot from a DOS CD. I changed the BIOS SATA setting to IDE and tried booting from the XP CD one more time and it worked. I was able to go in and delete the Vista and factory backup partitions, make new partitions and format NTFS for an XP Pro install. Yippee! I did not like Vista at all.