NEED HELP! Please

[stephisturtle]

OK I made some huuuge boo boos. I was redoing my sisters computer and and I didnt know I was supposed to use the recovery disk because I never reformatted a newer hp. Well after I installed windows xp it was of course all messed up and someone told me to put in the recovery disk and reformat that way. So I put in the recovery disk and an error came up. So I put back in the xp disk and deleted the harddrive space and put the recovery disk back in. Its now saying there is no hard drive found and I need to insert the FDisk. What is this? and what do I do? Please help. I only have a few hours before my sis gets up and I have to have this fixed! Thankyou to whoever responds!!!

[Cook_1]

Guessing the HP had windows ME on it? That's what mine had and installing Win XP wasn't even a prob. Ok, I know that if you go to download.com you can DL fdisk to a floppy or something, I always have one handy. Maybe I installed XP wrong but this was the order I did it on my HP.

1. Boot up
2. Insert XP disc
3. Followed the instructions and hit next when needed to.

[stephisturtle]

Im not sure what version was on it... whatever was on there when we bought it :/ But now there is xp on there and I don't know how to get it back the way its supposed to be. My hp recovery disk just comes up with an error. I don't want xp on there... I want whatever is supposed to be on there when you use the hp recovery disk.

I hope Im making sense.. I need help :'(

[RicheemxX]

well bad news is unless you own a working copy of the old os you more than likely won't get it back to the way it was. Good new is you can go to bootdisk.com and make a bootable floppy to re-format your hard drive and then you might be able to put another os on there. AFAIK recovery disks don't have a working OS on them they are usually just loaded with the drivers for the computer and its hardware. However if it does have an OS then you shoukd be able to boot directly from the cd and begin the re-instal