Killdisked my Hard Drive, Can't install OS. Please help!

your drives might not been partitioned yet. If the CD is not booting up, go into the BIOS and change the boot priority to where the CD-ROM is first. The CD should boot up and setup will begin. If the drives are clean and formatted, the computer should recognise that and will format it with NTFS or FAT32, whichever you choose.

 

Well if the drive is not fomatted, you will need to create the partition (C:\) so the computer recognises the drive. Since the setup will do that for you, if you do the setup, at least you will know if it's another issue becuase Windows XP should format the drive to whichever FAT table you want (recommend NTFS)

 

The drives are not formatted. Killdisk writes zeros to the drive; it is in the same condition as it was when new [excepting physical wear of the disk]

Boot with your xp cd and create a partition; it defaults to the full size of the disk. If you want more than one partition, use the backspace key to type in a new size. Leave the rest unallocated; you will use disk management to create and format additional partitions once the os is installed.

 

Here is a guide for installing xp home. There is one for pro on the same web site. It even has screenshots of the menus you will see.

 

Sorry I see you have pro. There is a guide for pro as well.

 

Yes, you must set your bios to boot from the cd as first boot device. You are getting the message because the computer is trying to boot from the hd. The xp cd is bootable; just set the bios to boot from the cd first.

 

Is this a full version of xp or is it a recovery disk? Do you see a message "to boot from cdrom press any key"? If so you only have a few seconds to press any key.

 

In some rare instances your computer may not boot from the cd. In that case download the program that makes the setup disks for you. You can download this from bootdisk.com. You will need 6 floppies to make the setup disks.