Guido, bit unsure of what's going on exactly now, but it sounds like you have several problems, one being you have 2 installations, one complete, one aborted. Secondly not being able to boot from CD.

First and very obvious question is the CD a geniune MS XP CD? If not it could be that which is stopping the boot process, could be the actual CDROM, but I am guessing it was working before this whole mess began?

I'm guessing you may also want to keep the data (if possible) on your PC, if you do you might be best to put the drive in another PC and master/slave them to drag the data off.

Eventually though you will have to rebuild this drive, I always advise people to build a small primary partition for their operating system (C), something like 10-20Gb, then create another partition (D) for their data, so in practice all of the applications will be on the C: drive and all of the users data should be saved to the D: drive and if a failure occurs you can rebuild the C: drive and retain the data.

HTH

Cheers JPM

The PC was built by the bods in my last job. I was supplied with a Setup CD (Yup it's on a blank CDR) once I took it home from the office.

I'm looking to scrub the whole C: Drive. I have all my apps to enable reinstall. All the 'My Documents' data, my Outlook folders and my Explorer 'Favourites' have been copied to the D: drive for safe keeping. In that sense I am ready to clear the whole drive. Don't care what's on it now as I have all the stuff I've produced and disks to reload the apps I actually want back on.

Just can't afford to be stuck without a PC if this setup CD does not reinstall XP or I can't get to a stage in DOS where I can type 'Setup.exe to run the CD.

Stumped...well and truly..