help with laptop hard drive format

[mark1982]

hi, i have an acer aspire laptop with no floppy drive, i have tried doing clean installs of xpsp2 but then after i always get asked which installation i want to start my system with. So i want to format the hard drive and do a clean install on a clean drive, i have tried but can´t get it to boot from cd, i have tried the windows xp instalation disc and a boot disc i downloaded from the internet, i dont get the typical "press any key to boot from disc message" and i have set the dvd drive as the first boot drive but nothing, all i get is the OS selection menu where i can choose from previous installations of windows or the current one, any help would be appreciated, thanx

 

[eyeless41]

that sounds very similar to my problem, refer to my post

http://www.techist.com/forums/f84/hard-drives-screwed-up-152997/

the guy is helping me out

 

[DaMadScientist]

Acer laptops have the recovery a bit complicated, i think its Alt+F10 to get into there recovery console

 

[mark1982]

thank you for the replies. the problem is there was a virus a while back that destroyed all the files, it set everything to 0kb, the files were still there but had no substance, so recovery is out of the question, i can install windows if i do it from windows but then once installed it asks me to chosse which version of windows i want to start with, it is a list with 4 options all identical "windows xp profesional", so i need to completely format the drive then istall windows but cant find a way to make it boot from cd