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I am trying to install XP SP2 Home on a Dell Inspiron 531s. Yes it came with Vista but I happen to own a legal copy of XP. I bought the hard drive off eBay(used). I changed the bios settings to boot from CD and when I start up the computer it goes to the hard drive which says its been cleaned using eban XX.XXX.XXX.

My problem is that I can't get the PC to boot from the XP disk. I have tried putting the disk into another PC it works. I have put the bad hard drive back in and the dvd+rw works. I am really stumped and am beginning to think that the hard drive is unusable. I only have the sata cords for 1 hard drive to be hooked up at a time.

Any ideas or suggestions or confirmation that I can't use this hard drive would be appreciated. Yes I am probably a 'noob' but I have installed XP and Vista many times without any problems. I don't need to be put down on my level of experience I just need answers.

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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 22 '10 at 20:12

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

3 Answers

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This sounds like your BIOS settings have the harddisk higher in the boot priority list than your CD-ROM drive, you'd have to either edit the order in which they are checked or use the boot menu (If available in your BIOS).

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up vote 0 down vote

Hook it up to another Microsoft computer via usb and reformat it.

Reformat it NTFS for XP.

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If you are booting from a Windows Disk it should be able to do that anyway. The Windows DVD doesn't even require a hard drive to exist to boot from it. (Though you can't get very far in the installation). – vcsjones Dec 23 '10 at 11:34
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up vote 0 down vote

You can also try installing linux for USB.

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