Can anyone help me, I installed a new 40g hard drive in a Dell C610 laptop. the old drive stopped orking and could not be read by the system at start up. the new drive is in and noticed by the PC, but I cannot boot from my XP cd, nor can I install because the disk is not formatted/partitioned. how can I get over this and get up and running again. Thank You.You NEED to go into the setup by pressing F2, F10 or Delete at start and set the boot order to CD first, then HDD then floppy.
Hit F10 to save the changes and Exit and have the CD in...the setup process will start upon re-boot provided this is a genuine XP CD.I must correct, my op system is WINDOWS ME, please don't laugh, I've tried what you suggested but it isn't working. the bios sees the new drive and the DVD/CD drive, but WONT boot. the options that I get are reboot F1 or ENTER bios F2.

Any new ideas? tried to make boot disk from on-line resource but it wouldn't work either.

Thanks, Quote

tried to make boot disk from on-line resource but it wouldn't work either.