I just wiped my hard drive completely after moving my files ... I want to start over with a fresh INSTALL of Windows XP but when I load it from an external cd drive it says "No operating system". What do i do?Do you have an internal CD/DVD drive ? ?
If so try it in that...if not you may need one if your system doesn't support booting to a USB device.no its a laptop ... i gotta extra battery instead of a internal drive so my external drive is my only sourceYou will need to check your BIOS to see if it supports booting from a USB device, if so set it to do so and load your Windows CD from there.

If not, and if your HDD had a hidden restore partition, you may not have wiped it off, so you may be able to restore your OS from there.I have the same problem except I also wiped the drivers for my PCMCIA slots so my external CD drive doesn't work.I have been trying to get help at PCMech.com but the answers I got assume I speak DOS so they are over my head. I got an ADAPTER (IDE) so Icould hook the hard drive up to my desktop but it didn't come with any instructions so the first time I tried it I wiped the hard drive on my desktop too. Well I fixed the problem with my desktop but no luck with the laptop drive. I am going to follow your progress hope we can get our laptops up and running.XP will not boot from an external drive without a whole heck of alot of tweaking and goofing around...not for the faint of heart.

Hootie it's best to start your own topic even THOUGH the situation is similar so it can recieve the proper attention...