computer science

Start the computer and insert your Windows XP CD. After a few seconds, the screen will clear and you will see a 'press any key to boot from CD' prompt. Press the any key..... he he, there is no 'any' key, this is just a test ;)

Press any key to start the install. The prompt allowing you to install will time out after about 4 seconds, so if you don't hit any of the keyboard keys you will have to reboot to install.

The installer program will begin copying files from the CD.

Note: if you are installing WinXP onto a hard-drive that is not connected to a standard IDE port, for example a SCSI drive, or an IDE drive connected to a hardware RAID controller, you will need to press F6 when prompted at the bottom of the screen, immediately after the blue 'windows setup' screen appears. After about 2 minutes, this will bring up a dialog which allows you to install drivers for your SCSI or RAID device from a floppy disk. Many computer motherboards have RAID controllers built into them, so be aware that this may be a required step.

The 'welcome to setup' screen appears. Press enter to continue. View the licensing agreement and hit F8 to continue.

The installation program will then search your drives for any prior installation of XP. If it finds one, you will be given the option to repair it, which essentially reinstalls most system files while leaving the registry and installed programs intact. Otherwise, move forward to the partitioning and formatting section of the install.

The initial screen shows the hard disks connected to your system, and any partitions that may already be created.

A partition is simply a section of the free space on your hard-drive. Operating systems use partitions to logically assign drive letters. For example, if you have a single 40GB drive, you can allocate all the space to a single partition, but then you could only have a single drive (C:) visible in Windows.

If you chose to divide that 40GB into 4 different 10GB partitions, you could have 4 individual drives (say C:, D:, E:, and F:) within your Windows environment. Essentially, Multiple partitions allow multiple logical drives within a single physical drive, and can even allow different operating systems to co-exist on one drive if desired. Once a partition has been created, it must be formatted to be useful.