please help emachines w5243

hello,i have an emachines w5243 desktop amd athtlon 64,got a bad virus i erased my hard drive completely it had windows vista i erased hard drive want to install windows xp,i turn on computer and get BOOTMGR is missing press control alt del to restart and cannot get windows to install how do i fix it?the hard drive is western digital .i can provide more info if needed and i also set bios settings to boot from cd/dvd drive just cant get it to install windows xp.and yes i did try to use recovery cd that came with puter as well thanks in advance

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

The BOOTMGR is left over from the Vista installation. You need to perform a low-level wipe of the PC, completely erasing the boot sector, partition table, etc. If there is a 2nd 'recovery' partition, you can probably access it to reload Vista. However, if you want XP, you'll need an XP installation CD with a valid, legal Product Key. There are numerous tools that you can use to completely wipe the drive, including the software from Western Digital. They have a bootable CD you can download (from this link), and when you boot to it, it will guide you through formatting/cleaning the drive. You can also use one of these free programs to accomplish more-or-less the same thing:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/BootIt_Next_Generation_d646.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/CPM_Cute_Partition_Manager_d5369.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Dariks_Boot_and_Nuke_d4596.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Logic_d4780.html
I'm sure that other MG members have suggestions too. Anyway, once the drive is wiped and/or formatted, you can follow the steps in this guide to install WinXP from the CD. To save time, you can try following the steps in that guide first, and then if that doesn't work (it should), then you can try the other programs.... good luck!

If you have the restore disc that came with the PC for restoring Vista, you can use that too after using one the 'wiping' methods previously listed. I think it's not working now because of the way that EMachine builds their restore discs...