alright im back again

OK, whatever you used to run DOS FDISK. Can you use it to list the DIR of your XP CD and see that it's readable.
I don't know why it's not booting - the blank screen is a bit of a puzzle, I'd expect the BIOS to say something if it can't find anything to boot, and if it's found something I don't know why it would be totally blank !
If you can list the DIR, and can see a SETUP.EXE, you could try running it, but other than that I'm mystified. Do you have another PC you can boot the CD on (and cancel without doing anything of course) to verify that it's OK ?

PS

Sorry to abandon you with your problems, but it's gone 2am and I'm supposed to be getting up early in the morning, so I'm going to have to go. Hopefully the global nature of the forum will mean that someone from another time zone might be around soon to help, and will be more successful than I.
 
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i've used this disk many times before so it should be working but i'll try it on my laptop and see if it does naything

this is the dir of the xp cd

autorun
docs
1386
readme
setup
support
valueadd
win51
win51ip


when we run setup it says this program can not be run in dos mode

Addendum:

yes the disk works on my computer
 
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So the blank screen is DOS. Something must be getting in ahead of your CD then - unplug anything else that could boot and try again.
 
You dont want to run setup. CD to i386 and run Setup32.exe file. It should be there. That will start the isntall from that. :wink:

With Windows XP they switched the setup style to be in the i386 folder with the setup32 executable. Just try that and see what happens.
 
hmm, it tells me that there is no setup32 file on the disk
and when i try to cd to i386 it said general failure reading drive

Addendum:

ironically i found this on a google search of what files are contained inside the i386 folder, it is step by step instructions on how to install XP from the command prompt after FDISK'n. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307848/en-us
unfortionately it gives us an error when we try to run the file it says that there is a general failure reading drive A: which is weird cause we dont even have a drive A and we are running the disk from drive D
 
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hey well i did what it was saying and it gave me this error on a blue screen

Windows XP Setup


An internal Setup error occurred.

Could not find a place for a swap file.

setup cannot continue. Press ENTER to exit.


any ideas on fixing this?

Addendum:

guess what, we figured it out, we are now running windows XP. guess the only problem we have now is getting the drivers for his comp lol.
anyway for the people looking to see how to fix it, all we did was fdisk our hard drive, and DID NOT make another partition, insert the windows XP disk and run from there. XP creates a NTFS file system on the hard drive which allows it to install from there. enjoy.
 
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TYVM GURU, although drivers i found there made me unable to use the built in WLAN card, so the acer website actually had the proper drivers for once.
 
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