Hey,
I got a virus on my pc, so I decided to reinstall XP pro over the top of the existing one, so I was installing the os and my pc restarted without any prompting, my CDRW drive has done this quite alot in the past when trying to install things off a CD. So I was wondering is there any way to reintall XP without using the CD drive?
Or if someone has delt with the same problem and knows how to fix the drive.

Thank for the help.

Hello,did you set first boot in BIOS/Setup to CD rom put in XP disk F10 save and exit?When prompted on black screen to press ? to boot from CD/DVD did you do this?During the install the computer will reboot.
Only press ? to bott from CD/DVD once only when first prompted.Not any other time afterwards.

Do not install over the top if you had a virus reformat and install fresh.
Dodgy driver conflicts could also be the cause of reboots.
Do you have a clean partition? if so copy i386 folder to that and run from that folder WINNT32 from that folder in a windows enviroment. In theory it should install and allow format of c: . Failing that you need a way of getting into a DOS enviroment using a old win 98 boot floppy or similar. Images of these can be found through google

You can run Windows XP set up via a USB Flash drive.
Also do a full install, if you can get in to XP still (Which you might not be able to now depending on how far the install got). save you're stuff (my doucments-picture-music what ever) to somewhere else.

Hey umm i got about halfway through the reboot a while ago and it restarted about 20% of the way through so now i cant get into my pc without rebooting. Would you be able to teach me on how to boot with a usb?
Also today i went out and bought a new DVD drive but the computer does not recognize it when i have the CD inserted. When i have it plugged in it also takes a long time to "detect IDE drives" and then reads an error mesage saying "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" Could you give me some advice on this as well?

Thanks.