Ok so i'm Downgrading my old pc on vista to XP, and then passing it down to my parents, the reason for this is it's a pentium 4 with only 1gig Ram atm, yes it runs nicely on Vista Home, but frankly XP was awesomly fast on this system, so i wanted to reformat and install XP pro again (plus the parents always liked XP morem and Windows 7 isnt stable enough yet.

Still have all my old disks, and it has a couple of licence keys left on it so i thought, lets give this a whirl. Went into the Bios and told it to boot from Disk, so it should boot from my XP disk and then start to go through the format process and what ever ect, correct?, no!! It says 'boot from disk, press any key' then Vista Starts again.

I'm sure i'v done something wrong, or i'm being stupid (which is more than likely), i have never done this before, i just normally order the parts, construct it and then my mate installs the OS for me. So i thought it was time to learn.

Please Help i'm Noob in this area

Your good old friend,

hardlock

Hello hardlock, Welcome back to PCHF!

I have marked your thread as open to encourage the ones that know among us to come take a look

Thank you for your patience, someone will be with you to assist as soon as possible.

Smokeycheech

ok thankies, i'll just wait, i know the drill LoL :P

Hello HaRdLoCk,

Dumb question back at you. ;-) So, are you pressing a key when instructed to press any key?

Does the CD even spin up?

It may be that you will have to get a boot floppy (does this system still have a floppy drive?) and format the HDD before reinstalling XP.

Are you using a USB keyboard?

Erm yeh i'm pressing a key when it says 'press any key' and then it goes into vista again.

No i havent formatted the hard drive yet (cos otherwise vista wouldnt load lol, but i thought that you format it when you run the disk)

The disk spins after pressing any key, but dont load :S

And yes i am using a USB keyboard, (wireless) but i enabled it through the bios, otherwise i woudlnt be able to get into it :P


Yeh i know loads about dirvers and all the other lovely stuff with computers, but when i comes to formatting them and the basic making your own pc stuff i'm really pants

Can you try a PS/2 keyboard please, I've had the same problem my self that required me to use a PS/2 keyboard.