[newbe]

Hi, I have just recently gotten a new computer which came with Vista. Previously what I have done with any new operating system I got was installed it into my old computer. However, I came to find out you can only have one computer assigned to each...

Hi, I have just recently gotten a new computer which came with Vista. Previously what I have done with any new operating system I got was installed it into my old computer. However, I came to find out you can only have one computer assigned to each cd, unless I wanna buy another one, which is unecessary.

I wanted to get rid of Vista and return to XP but the XP disc would not install because of multiple errors, such as missing ntldr.

So I decided to use deriks boot and nuke to clear the hard drive, and that went smoothly.

Now, here is my problem... When I insert the XP cd it spins for a while and eventually comes to an error screen with:

"no boot sector on hard disk"
"CARDBUS NIC boot failed"

30 seconds or so later I also get this message

"No bootable devices"


Also, when I just start the computer normally, it does go to a screen that says no operating system found, which makes sense.

The weird thing is that the Windows Vista CD still starts up and goes to the installation area when I boot from CD drive, So I know my CD drive is working properly.

I have tried the XP CD in another computer and it works fine.

The computer with the problems is a Dell Inspiron 8500.

Sorry if this has been answered somewhere but I grew tired of reading through threads only to come to a very general solution of booting from the XP disc, which wont work.

Since I used deriks boot and nuke, I have not formatted and repartitioned the drive ( I don't know if that is the problem or not )

Any help would be appreciated.


Thanks,
Nate