I have a PC from my father-in-law that he purchased from a friend that got it from a school (it has admin passwords still). So I thought I'd reload XP for him, but it does not access CD when set up in bios... so I switched back to floppy boot sequence and I downloaded Microsoft's 6-pack of floppies to use as bootdisk for XP and it comes up with an error immediately after a:drive is accessed with the first disk:

BOOT: I/O ERROR READING DISK
PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER DISK

...and basically freezes...I can't do anything....no new disk helps...or hitting enter...just plain froze. The MS instructions for the floppies is pretty descriptive, so I know I didn't make any error there...at least i hope i didn't

So I thought it may not be reading the disk properly. So I formatted all the floppies (over an hour) and reloaded MS 6-pack boot disks and tried again and same error.

Then after reading forums, they say to put Win98 or 98se bootdisk in to get to a:\ to format c:drive. so I did and tried to format c: and it attempted to do something and came up with a msg saying that formatting c: was not allowed.

So any help would be great if you have any tips (step by step preferred)...thanks a bunch.

Hello scooterpop,

Welcome to PCHF,

As long as your using the full Windows XP CD and not the upgrade version, you'll be able to boot to it.

This will create a single bootable CD on one disk with CD-ROM support.
Windows Utility Boot Disk with CD-ROM Support

Formatting a floppy disk rarely fixes any problems with them. If there is any damage to the disk, it is there for good. You may want to try new floppies.

What is the exact message you get when you try to format C:, does it say the disk is locked? If so, use the command unlock c:

Also the format command you should use is format c: /s will make the HDD bootable.