1) Clean the XP CD, all XP CDs are bootable. Check also that you have
your PC set in the bios to boot from the CD before the hard drive.
2) Remember also that if installing from the original XP media rather than
more recent media with either SP1 or SP2 integrated you will not be able
to access more than 127GB of your hard drive until you install SP1.

Note also that by default XP (and XP SP1) start with the firewall enabled
so don't connect to the internet until you have either installed or
enabled a firewall or are behind a NATed router. Further XP will be by
default set to automatically reboot on error something you may well feel
like changing.
--
Mike Maltby



Gary wrote:

Thanks for responding guys. Here is an update. My XP CD is not
bootable or just won't boot -- it's pretty old (got XP years ago,
thought I'd wait for a better computer and that didn't happen until
now). So, I tried the six set up disks. That failed on disk 3
(couldn't load setupdd.sys code 7). I tried WD's Lifeguard program
again (to no avail), but I did find something at their site that said
their software would follow a procedure (after formatting) to put my
Win ME start up disk contents onto the hard drive (which it didn't do
of course). So, why does it want to do that and is that something I
should try? If yes, how? Also, tried to leave part of the drive
untouched and just go with a primary partition, and ME startup just
wouldn't go for that. Also, why is the total space read by FDISK so
far off while the logical drives are all correct when I try the old
fashioned way? Oh, I also tried to go into the XP i386 folder to run
winnt and start set up that way but I was told it was an invalid
directory. For that matter so was docs, all were but valueadded
which it opened up fine. Still in need of major help here.