I own an HP Pavillion desktop that my sisters-in-law got a virus on when i let them borrow it, and it crashed the computer. Now I am trying to figure out how in the heck to wipe the hard drive clean and re-install Windows XP professional so that I can have a system up and running at my house, because I work at home. Best buy geek squad WANTS to charge me an arm and a leg and for the price they quoted me i could go buy a new desktop, but i am not MADE of money unfortunately and either have to suffer GOING ten miles to my parents house or get this thing fixed. Help!You could do a system restore which if anything was added when this happen it WOULD be gone, yeah they usually do cause they try an seem like there better.I cannot even get the start screen to come up when I turn on the computer. I have tried going into the dos system, but I am not that computer literate, I just did what I was told by a friend of mine. He said to load the start up disk for XP professional and start the computer and then it should prompt me, but nothing comes up but a blank screen.Check your cds there should be one. If nothing else try an get a boot disk for your operating system but you need a floppy drive + floppies.1. you can try booting into safe mode, once you are in safe mode I would turn off system restore as the virus could be in the restore points as well once that is done you can run your anti virus and see if you can remove it. Once done with this step reboot your computer and turn system restore back on.

2. If you have your XP CD then you can boot into the XP CD and reformat the hard drive. The link below will give you step by step instructions.

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdoldhdd/indexfullpage.htm