XP DELL CD TRYING TO INSTALL ON AN OLD PC...

[ACE OF SPADES]

IS THIS POSSIBLE? I first went to a friends to install xp for him, he has 3 pcs in the house. One a dell w/dells XP home sp1, two an old Gateway w/Gateways restoration, operation Backup cd etc... version of win 98, and three an old built pc from one of his friends.. It came with NT on it, He wants XP on it and if not he will settle for 98.
I started first off repartitioning and reformatting the c: tried to boot from D: and it wont recognize dell xp as a system disk. any suggestions on how to get this to boot up. I then trie gateways crap. (win 98).. it ran installation from the start, then asked me for the 2nd cd which is the operation cd, installed it and it started running and then got done and it went to C prompt but it said:

Restoration cd

C:/

Any suggestions would be Appreciated!

[nickolaw]

Sometimes an old PC may dont accept WinXP as a system disk because its motherchip. if is there any incompatibility with both, you'll need to create a boot disk from a diskete, than you do the boot from the diskete

[ACE OF SPADES]

Thank you

But I already did a reformat with a bootdisk..
but are you saying make a diskette with xp on it??
Thanks
Ace

[EvilRick]

Each of those machines came with an OEM version of the OS. You're not supposed to install an OEM version of an OS on any PC except for the one it came with. It's illegal. Continuing to discuss this illegal activity will get you a ticket out of here.

Just so you know, it's not "motherchip", it's "chipset".

[ACE OF SPADES]

Thanks all
I figured it out I got him to buy xp from Best Buy today, installed it and all is well...
Thanks again
Ace