Cant boot outside of windows?

I am currently using a external cdrom for my laptop.I have XP Pro.I am trying to do a clean install and it will only boot up from within windows?I changed the boot sequnce to start with USB booting.But I have to wait for windows to load before I can insert my disk.Then I go through the registration process,etc..When I get to the partition area of the disk it wont let me delete C,but it will let me install over the existing.As far as partition D it only has 8 on it and the system says it is to small.It wont let create a partition either.Am I doing something wrong here,or is it suppose to do it this way?Thanks

 

Are you sure you said you wanty to install a new version of the OS when prompted?

The 8 meg partition is something everyone has. windows uses it. You never see it yourself besides from in the install program.

As for your booting problem. It most likely is a limitation of the external drive. So you can try putting the disc in well in windows and then rebooting or you could also try and install an internal drive just to get things setup.

 

What I want to do is get rid of the xp install and do a clean install.I know I downloaded the same version of xp on top of the previous one.I want to delete the "C" and reinstall my XP Pro as a clean install but it wont let me delete the existing.

 

Do you have a floppy drive?

 

No I dont.

 

OK, is it possible for you to hit F8 whilst booting so that you can get to the command prompt? If so, you should be able to acess FDISK

 

My bad, I don't think that'll work for you. I'll have a look around and see what I can see. Just btw do you have a USB pen drive?

 

no pen drive.just a cdrom.

 

Sine you don't have a CD drive. What you can do is make a bootdisk on a CD, or well...

Hmm, since you arn't able to use your external CD drive as a boot device you're going to run into problems with that.

Just go out and put a disk drive or an internal CD drive in. It really makes things much easier. It only costs a couple bucks for a disk drive too.

Since you can't read any disks without the use of windows, the only other thing you can do is use something like partition magic to create a partition to copy the install files onto. Then you can launch the installer and copy the files to that drive. Which would then make it possible for you to format C: when installing since the install files wouldn't be on C:.

 

Re: Cant boot outside of windows?\Now I can!

This is info I found out the extreme hard way.I have a Inspirion 5150 with XP Pro.Using an external CDROM will only let you install windows from within windows only.I just installed my new CDROM and was able to do a clean install.Now,it works like a CHAMP.Thanks to everyone that tried to help me.It even reinstalled the error "system32/hal.dll" that was present also.But I will tell you that I will never,never,never buy another computer from where mine is from.I dont know if it is against forume rules or I would really express myself!!