If computer crashes big time, what to do?

[Oromocto]

shahani has been so gracious to offer to help me on this that although I don't have a problem and haven't had since I installed Win XP home edition with clean install, this information should be helpful to many others.

I had a Compaq previously, and I got spoiled by using their "Restore Disk". My Dell, should it crash, will put me into very unfamiliar territory.
I have:
Dell Dimension 4100, 1-Ghz, 512Meg RAM, Two CD Drives, floppy drive and a ZIP Drive. No Restore disk.

The machine came with Win ME installed and then I installed Win XP as an upgrade against lots of good advice, because I had no experience with a clean install that everyone recommended (big mistake). Everything was OK except IE6 was corrupted and I could neither un-install it or write over it. So I decided to reinstall Win Xp. It started installing and after a time crashed big time. I had no option but start over. Soon I had no option but to do a clean install and it led me by the nose through that process and has worked like a dream for one and 1/2 years.

What I would like to have is a step by step procedure to bring me from a corrupted hard drive,(but fixable) with a format and re-
install of Win XP

Some of the posts that I read said that I should set my BIOS to recognize my CD ROM as first drive. It is currently set as second with floppy set as first. Even that seems to be controversial information.

shahani, go to it boy.

[BeeQuewl]

Having the floppy drive set as the first boot device will not matter if the floppy drive is empty...it will check the floppy then check the next device (presumably your cd-rom) then the next ( Hard Drive) etc etc down the line... check BIOS settings to determine which is first, second etc

i dont have a legal copy of XP (which is why im not running it anywhere) but Win 2K would allow me to boot from the CD, then, with some finagling of options, delete any/all partitions and create/format a new partition, then install on new partition of choice...unknown if Win XP has this, but i cant believe Mickeysoft would sell an OS that was unable to be installed on a blank HD unless it was an upgrade (like the win 98 "Update" SE cd, although it occurs to me there was a trick to doing that without the "upgradeable system" (i.e.: win 3.1, 95, 98 )...

kinda got to rambling but hope this helps...

[lynchmob]

When you do a clean install from an upgrade CD,it runs the installation like a full ver.CD but asks you at some point during the install to put a Win(98,ME,2K etc) CD into the CD drive so it can verify your doing a legal install.
HTH
lynch

[Oromocto]

Thanks BeeQuewl & lynchmob: I think that I now see the picture clearly as to dealing with the CDs.

I come across statements in the posts that I can't resolve, perhaps I am taking them out of context. I will list a couple:

"The XP disk won't work in a DOS environment" I have run across that statement a number of times in different posts. Some people say that if you have a major crash Would will be in a DOS environment and the XP CDs won't work.

Some people say that there is no DOS in XP and others say there is.

Do you have any insights along that line?

[Telexen]

eh?

Your system won't have a problem booting to the CD...

[Oromocto]

Thanks Telexen-- Makes sense to me.