novice needs installation help

[cattie]

I hope I can get some advice here. I'm a newbie & my knowledge of computers is next to nothing. I recently bought a machine specific copy of win xp home from ebay. The seller supplied some instructions for installing it by booting from a supplied floppy, which I've found a bit complicated & involved because of my lack of knowledge Ive already had 2 abortive attempts to install it this way. I've followed the instructions through formating, then copying a directory called i386. I think I did these parts ok. The instructions then say to run winnt. When I type in run winnt I get a bad command error. Is there something I haven't done right?

I see after trying to install xp this way with the boot disk that I now have 2 drives on my computer, c & d whereas before I only had a c drive.

So I've ended up having to reinstalling win ME back on my computer & then decided perhaps I should try to install win xp by booting from the cd thinking this may be the easiest thing to do, but I got totally confused when it started asking me about partitions & sizes & that kind of stuff & something about having 2 operating systems, as I just don't understand any of it or what I'm supposed to do. I just want to have xp on the computer, not ME as well. So I've had to give up on this too. I'd hoped you just popped the disc in it just did the installation automatically without any such input from me. Also not sure if I am going to try again booting from the cd if I should only have a c drive again, not c & d as I now have.


Sorry if I sound a real idiot, I don't even know if I've explained things clearly. But I'm in desperate need of help & advice, preferably step by step because of my lack of knowlege. I'm looking for the easiest option for a dumbo! Please help if you can.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Hello there! Perhaps I can guide you in the right direction...Its pretty easy if you follow a few basic steps..With a newer OS such as Windows XP I would even bother booting from a floppy and doing it the way the instructions said..now since you said you were able to boot from the CD already that is a good thing and one less step...Now I am assuming you want to start from scratch and there is no data on the hard drive you wish to save right? That way we can reformat the drive...

A few basic terms you should know...I will give you the basic run down not all the techy nerdy stuff

FORMAT= Means that you will erase all data from the hard drive and perpare it for installation of an OS.

PARTITION=Basically it is a way of organizing the hard drive or configuring multiple hard drives..To keep it easy I will use one drive in my example. Say you have a 60GB hard drive and you want all that space to be one drive letter C:\ then that would be 1 "partition". Now say you wanted to split the 60GB hard drive into 2 "partitions" you would half the drive so now you would have a C:\ and D:\ at each 30GB each...thats the basic idea..

Now do this to install it easiest:

1) Boot from the windows XP disc let it do its thing until it asks you questions...just keep choosing the options that will let you continue to install Windows XP as you will get asked do you want to "R" repair the current windows installation etc etc..

2) You will get to a point where you will see your current "partitions" which according to the info you provided would be C:\ & D:\. You want to delete these both by hitting the appropriate keys (It will tell you on the screen) it is usually "D" for delete then "enter" then "L" do this for all partiions you see listed there.

3) Now it should say Unpartioned space 60,000MB or whatever your hard drive is...click "C" and this will create a default C:\ partition.

4) Choose the newly created C:\ for the installation path.

5) Format using NTFS (FULL)

6) Follow the on screen instructions from there on out..


Its pretty basic after you get the install moving along.