"blue screen of death" help needed

[SGT T.]

hmmm, ok
you need to change the boot sequence. Right now, when you turn your computer on its looking for an Operating System. (OS). The problem is that its looking in the Hard Drive first, and thats where the jacked up version of winXP is. What you have to do is get it to look in the CD-ROM drive first instead of the hard drive and then it will load winXP from the CD. In order to do that, you need to access the BIOS. You can do that by (SOMETIMES) pressing F2 or F12 as soon as the computer starts. (The reason I am not real sure on this is that different computers use different versions of BIOS, and each one works a little differently. Some you can get into using F2, some F12, and I am sure there are others. F2 is the more common one though.) Once you get into the BIOS, you just need to look around for something called BOOT SEQUENCE or BOOT DEVICE. Again because of the different BIOS's out there, I can't tell you where it is in the BIOS, you just have to look for it. Let me know how it goes!

[mikelum]

yes, even when i restart with the cd-rom already in, it still asks to selct either safe mode or etc, and whatever i select, it still goes to the blue screen

[mikelum]

it was F12

it asks to select between the following

removable dev
atapi drive
boot to utility partition
system setup
ide drive diagnostics

which one do you suggest?

[mikelum]

oops there was also

hard drive

on that list

but i suppose this is specifically the one you try to avoid

[SGT T.]

Removable Device.

[mikelum]

as of now i tried
removable device
and it didn't work

then i started with F2
which allowed me basically the same boot changes so tthere i selected also
removable device (1st boot)

and restarted
without success neither

[SGT T.]

Hmmmm,
Are you SURE thats a winXP disk? Or is it a recovery disk?
Either way, that should've booted from CD Rom... it this a laptop or a desktop? -(thinking desktop)

[mikelum]

yes the CD it is win xp
actually it is the DELL "operating system reinstallation cd windows xp"

and yes
it is a desk top

also, after F2 i checked
advanced and noticed on plug and play it says NO

[mikelum]

oh oh it's suddenly getting somewhere!!!!

"windows setup, set up is loading files etc etc"

[mikelum]

all right it asked if i wanted to install XP or if i wanted to recover XP and repair (R) which is what i selected
now it asks

1.C:\WINDOWS
which windows installation would youu like to log onto
(to cancel, press ENTER>?

what do you suggest ?