unable to format, so can't reinstall

hey guys, for starters i want to let you know this isn't a laptop problem, its an XP Pro problem on a desktop. You guys have never let me down so far so sorry if me asking here annoys anyone.

My comp has XP home installed and had about 200+ trojans, spyware, worms, infections of all type, so I downloaded Microsoft Antispyware beta 1 and it removed, i think it said 237 infections. Now I want to be sure that nothing stays so i wanted to completely reformat my PC. Unfortuantely the PC didn't come with the XP home cd and all i have is XP Pro so i threw it in the drive and clicked install XP and New install. Everything went fine (i followed the clean install guide on this forum) up until the partition blue screen (i don't get the user agreement screen, i don't know if that means anything) In the partition screen I have the 1 drive (C:/) and its cap is 37gb or something like that. But when i go to delete this partition it tells me "Setup is unable to perform the requested operation on the selected partition. This partition contains temporary Setup files that are required to complete te installation" and doesn't give me any other options.

So when i hit enter, i'm back at the partition blue screen and my only options are again:
-set up XP on selected drive, ENTER
-Create partition in unpartitioned space, C
-delete selected partition, D (which doesn't work, above)

I don't want to install two OS' (two XP Pro's) on the same HD and i don't want to repair i want to format then install. What am i doing wrong? Any comments would be VERY appreciated. Thanks nh

note that i accidentally did hit ENTER and installed XP Pro on the selected (only) drive but i don't see Home anywhere so i'm guessing that XP Pro is the OS now. thanks

 

u need to boot from the CD

 

I think that may be my biggest problem. I have two drives, one is a CDRW and the other is a newly installed DVDRW. When i go into the BIOS and move to BOOT it has the boot sequence. For the boot priorities it has:

-CDRW
-DVDRW
-Floppy

and it says to use the -/+ keys to change the order. So i changed the order to make the CDRW first but when i reboot it just logs in to windows normally and i can't see a "press X to boot from cd..." anywhere. I know this cd is bootable because I used it to install XP Pro on my laptop.

 

If you have an old Windows 98 floppy, then you can stick that in and boot to a DOS window. From there, you can simply type "Format C:" (assuming you want to format C) and it will format.

Then you should be able to install as normal.

If not, you can try to find the files to make one.

 

okay, maybe I'm just reading this wrong, but it sounds like you installed it. When you pressed enter, and it installed XP Pro, you rebooted and you went into to xp pro?

You don't have to delete the partition in order to install it eventhough that is recommended. It will delete the partition itself while it is putting the new system on.

Did I miss something?

 

No i don't think he go to install in window yet. He have only rebooted after window cd copied installation file onto his computer and not boot from CD. He's stuck at the part where he need to create partition. I had that happen before. You can't delete the partition because the installation is running from teh C drive. You should do what drumfu said. Boot from CD. Either that or just install over the existing partition.

 

thats just it... i have no idea what happened. When i click properties on My Computer it says WinXP Pro SP2 but all my old files and folders are in my C drive, but when i click add/remove progs theres nothing listed. Its not even letting me install over the existing partition. And its getting annoying because i have to enter my CD key every time i try this so after three tries i need to get a new key. I've already had to get two (installed on my laptop and so many f-k ups, i'm a uni student so i get them for free but its still a hassle and they will start thinking i'm selling this stuff) I downloaded the xp bootdisks from microsoft.com gunna give that a try. Do any of you know why it would not boot from CD when the cd is the primary boot source?