big problems please help me

Hi

I brought a new pc with Vista on it but after a month of Vista i was sick of it so decided to go back to a copy of xp i have. So i booted up from xp setup and all seemed fine, did the format but when it restarts to continue the setup it comes back and wants to format the drive agian (this happens everytime it just keeps looping and gettin nowhere) anyway on my last try it rebooted but said it couldnt find any partitions to put xp onto. So i gave up restarted with the vista cd and tried to intsall that but now that is saying pick where i want to install it (or something bout drivers) but the list is empty ! so it wont install either !!

At the moment i have run startup repair from the vista CD and the status says - ' Attempting repairs' but its been like that for at least 30mins, and it wont let me click cancel.


Any help would be greatly appeciated - at the moment i cant install or do anything
 
hi the_one_uk, welcome to NST.

Sounds like your MBR was corrupted, you'll need to nuke it to get anything to install.

Grab yourself a copy of the free dban boot disk from http://dban.sourceforge.net/ and use it to zap your MBR and then you can install either XP or vista at will.
 
Hi Thanks for the speedy reply, how can i install he program because i cant boot any operating system up. ? Also after scanning the forum i noticed that XP cant use SATA drive and mine s SATA as it says in the bios is that the problem in the first place ?.

Addendum:

Hisome further info on my PC -asus p5nd2 selga775,nvidia crush19 ultradual ddr2pci-esata2gblancan anyone see anything there which would not allow me to put xp on it ?

Addendum:

Hisome further info on my PC -asus p5nd2 se lga775, nvidia crush19 ultradual ddr2 pci-esata2 gblancan anyone see anything there which would not allow me to put xp on it ?
 
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There's no problem installing XP to a SATA drive. Thats where my copy is.
The disk Guru mentioned is bootable. Just stick it in the DVD tray and turn on.
 
unfortuntly it didnt work, let me clarify the situation- If i try to install XP it finds the partition, formats the disk says it all successful, Then it restarts itself. Once restarted it loads up again but doesnt carry on with installation it just goes back to square one and asks which partition i want to format (only have 1)- if i try to install Vista again its says where do you want to install windows ? but the box below is blank with a warning message - "No drivers were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation". And click that and browse but dont know what im looking for and it never finds anything.
 
What Guru was advising was to
1 use the system you're using to talk to us now, to download the bootable disk he pointed to.
2 Then boot that disk on your broken PC to repair your MBR.
3 Then try your XP install again
 
I feel for you.
If you look in the water cooler threads, I just mentioned that I went broadband today. I'm on a different PC to the one I last spoke from, but both are connected simultaneously and I just did a download that would have taken 4 hours this morning in 2 minutes. What luxury !
Since you're in UK too, you might want to look at orange.co.uk/max. The bundle is cheaper than the previous sum of parts, and comes with a free second phone line (VoIP) and though not bedded in yet is amazingly fast compared to what I've been used to for years.
 
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