mark strelecki

Take it from someone whose done over a thousand clean installs over the last twenty years: Disconnect any and all devices EXCEPT the keyboard, mouse and monitor, before booting up and running setup. No USB stuff, no printers, no external ANYTHING, especially drives! Set BIOS to boot from the HD you want as C FIRST. Be certain it has an ACTIVE partition, preferably occupying the entire drive. Then use whichever key gets you to the one-time boot menu (on my Dells it's F12, on my AMD box it's F11, etc.) to select the CD/DVD drive with the XP setup files. You'll only do this the one time, then let setup reboot to the HD after the initial textmode file copy. That's the way I do it and it's worked consistently, although your particular hardware environment may introduce other variables. After setup is complete, you can reconnect all that external stuff one device at a time and let them configure completely. Best luck to you, with greets from Atlanta, GA. USA.

That looks like a CPU ID to me.....