HELP! Home Computer Down!

Factual Questions
1

Well, I feel stupid but I lost my system disk (ie bootable floppy) and the hard disk crashed. I have all of my other disk (XP, motherboard, vidio, audio,printer ect . . .) and my hard drive is supposivly backed up on my portable hard drive (in compressed format, unbootable).

So, can I just reformat my hard drive and start over? Do I need to hook my hard drive up to another computer to reformat it? Could I just buy a newer/bigger hard drive and upgrade at the same time? If I buy a new hard drive what should I watch out for in terms of compatability (I have an IDE drve I think).

Thanks in Advance.

2

If you have your XP disc, you’re golden. All you need to do is figure out how to boot to a CD (try putting the XP cd in and restarting…if that doesn’t work, you’ll need to find the setting in the BIOS setup). The CD should have all the tools you need to reformat and reinstall.