Harddrive is in a total mess help ?

Jooooles

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have a dell lappy and the hard drive is in a mess it has windows xp on it.
and vista ultimate both wouldnt boot at all so i tried to just wipe it format the partitions and create a new xp pro

the xp pro disk booted and i tried to format the hard drive but it crashed

now when I boot up all i get is black screen saying NO BOOTMGR


HOW DO I FORMATT THIS HARD DRIVE AND PUT A NEW XP ON IT SOMEONE SUGGESTED SPOTMAU DISK BUT I HAD A LOOK AND THERE NOT CHEAP
ANY IDEAS PLEASE :proud::banana::Cheers:
 
Boot the XP disc again, go for a new install, then delete the partitions from within setup and create a new one. Don't try and install over the top of an existing install or it will get so far and then attempt to load your previous config of the hard disk and fail again.
 
Boot the XP disc again, go for a new install, then delete the partitions from within setup and create a new one. Don't try and install over the top of an existing install or it will get so far and then attempt to load your previous config of the hard disk and fail again.

wont even boot from cd at all it just goes straight to NO BOOTMGR

Think im gonna take the hard drive out and use it as a slave but its screwed in ive never touched a lappy hard drive before what tool do i need to remove it and what lead do i need to attach it to comp as a slave so i can formatt it
 
as long as its not a new laptop which uses sata hdd you should be able to use one of these http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160237761189 at 2.99 u can then put lappy hdd onto a normal ide cable in a desktop machine.

if a dell cant u get to boot manager on boot to select boot form cd/dvd ?

as said if u can boot from cd use xp delete partitions one at a time untill all deleted so it says all available disk space unused. now you can give xp 20g to install and once installed you can setup another partition to install apps and data.
 
Just a quick note.

You can always download a copy of minipe and use partition magic to recrete your partitions. You should be able install windows xp / vista then. If you cant boot onto cd then check your bios.
 
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