i used a utility to WIPE my hard drive prior to selling my old dell dimension pc. when i tried to reinstall windows xp (i have a boot cd), i keep getting the message that i need to hit any key to install, but the pc looks to the a drive for the boot disk. my limited dos memory is gone... what do i do to get the computer to look at the cd drive?When you power on, look for a quick message about boot order, press the indicated key and make the CD drive the 1st boot device.

If there is no boot order message, enter the BIOS and look for a boot order screen. Make the CD the 1st boot device, save and exit. Enter the BIOS by pressing the key indicated in the message that appears immediately after powering on or re-booting. Typically, it's F2 or DEL - just watch for the message. It may say "To enter setup," press XX.Thanks for the help, but...i got into bios and changed the setting FIRST to atapi cdrom and that did not fix the problem, so then i tried IDE hdd (but now i'm remembering that is the hard drive itself), but that did not work either... i will try again saving it with the cd rom as 1st default for boot, but if that does not work any other ideas?
i just reset the settings and no it is giving me the message "invalid boot diskette, insert boot diskette in a:" i don't even have the floppy as one of the boot options the way i saved it.
 Sounds like the computer is set to boot from the floppy drive.

1) In the BIOS, set the boot order to: #1 Atapi CD-ROM, #2 IDE Hard Drive; sometimes these BIOS screens are not straightforward, make SURE that you have it right.

2) Save and exit the BIOS - QUITE often the F10 key, but, carefully make sure that you exit the BIOS "Saving" changes.

3) Make sure that the XP CD or recovery disk is in the CD drive when the computer re-boots; if the CD is not in the drive, the computer will try the CD first, not find bootable media, then try to boot from the hdd, which it won't be able to find!What utility did you use to wipe that drive ?
Is this a genuine Windows CD with shiny holograms that says Microsoft all over it ?