Reformatting Problem

Hello.

I have an IBM Thinkpad T23. I have all of my drivers, everything squared away to reformat. I popped in my windows cd, selected CD Rom from the boot order... and nothing.

It won't boot to the CD Rom and for some reason it recognizes my cd rom as removable hardware. Which doesn't come on until Windows is loaded.

I don't know what to do about it, I tried various methods (i.e. changing the boot order in the bios as well as selecting the "temporary" boot order in the F12 menu).

I run a company with this laptop when I'm on the go and it REALLLLLY needs reformatted. I urgently need help, thus I'm on major geeks! The people who have saved me so many times haha.

Appreciate the help once again!

 

That is exactly how I tried to do it but it won't boot to the CD rom because its recognizing it as removable hardware and it doesn't turn on until windows is already up.

Windows XP Professional is the OS I am installing. I bought the CD at Best-Buy and its 100% legit.

 

Well, I know its technically removable... but I also know that windows shouldn't recognize it as such. It's showing it removable as a flash drive or such. I can right click, safely remove hardware and the cd-rom is on that list. As if its as I said, removable media.

The hang up, is that since its removable as a USB drive would be... it doesn't turn on the cd-rom until windows is all the way up and running. So as you said, it boots straight thru to windows even when I tell it to boot to the CD-Rom, its like its ignoring my request. I tried telling it to boot to CD Rom in the temporary boot order menu, I also tried changing the boot order in bios. Both ways, it just boots thru to windows as if I hadn't changed anything.