lawgers

sorry, my bad, it is a dvd-rom.

yes, we did mean dvd

I have an old cd-rom, i will give it a try. If I try to boot on another pc I don't have to install it do I?

Thanks for replying, no I didn't get any messages, it just started straight up from hdd onto xp.

I assure you that I have saved the bios settings, and they are as I set them when I re-entered bios.

Sorry I'm not being very helpful am I. Thats right, genuine copy of Vista and I've set and saved the Bios to start up cd-rom first. It then starts from the hard drive, the cd rom light comes on a for a few seconds but thats it. It starts XP, then asks me to activate it.

As for the Cd-rom, she has used it for music cds before, so it should be ok

Yes its a brand new hard drive, the recovery disk, or what she told me was a recovery disk, did work ??? The Vista disk is a full version. It just says Windows Vista Home Premium, 32-bit software only. I'm beginning to think that recovery disk she gave me was a copy! I will be having words with her.

Sorry, didn't realise I was. I built the pc from scratch, so yeah its brand new apart from the cd drive which was taken from her old pc. Do you think I've done something wrong when I built it, another thing I've never done before! I really don't know what I'm doing! Please help. :)

To be perfectly honest I have no idea, this is my first time of installing an os. She had a recovery disk, it let me continue without the key for a while. It has now locked me out of xp. I couldn't get the other girl to buy vista until pay day (friday).

Firstly, the Bios shows the cd drive, so it should be ok? The girl I built the pc for lost the key for the xp copy, she's pretty blonde when it comes to these things!

I definately saved the changes using f10

I built a new pc for a friend recently. Its got a MSI K9N Neo motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 cpu. She had a recovery disk which I used to re-install XP. We couldn't find the key for this copy of XP, so she bought VISTA Home Premium. The XP version is now locked out as I was unable to activate it. Thought I could just boot from the Vista CD. I changed the BIOS setup to boot from CD, but it still boots from HDD. Any ideas, my friend is back soon and I wanted to have here PC up and running before she got back. Thanks