Help! Winodws xp lost!

Okay i have a emachine computer and it had windows xp on it well one day it was getting really sloppy to the point were even winodws restore wouldnt solve the problem. so i uninstalled windows and was going to reinstall it well now when i try to boot from the cd it say like invalid disk or something so i got my OLD wndows ME cd just something to get it back working and when i try to boot from it, it says REBOOT OR SELECT YOUR PROPER BOOT DEVICE (WHICH I DID CD/RW DRIVE ONLY DRIVE IN THE THING) THEN IT SAYS OR LOAD YOUR MEDIA INTO YOUR BOOT DEVICE. I PUT THE CD IN AND IT STILL SAYS IT.....CAN ANYONE HELP!!!!

(SIDENOTE: IF IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE WHEN I DELETED WINDOWS I FORMATED THE PARTITION BUT I CREATED A NEW NTFS PARTITION AND SET IS A DEFAULT AND DELETED THE OLD ONE)

I'm assuming that you have an XP Install CD...

You've already "messed up" by reformating the drive, in doing so you lost all your programs. Too late now, but if you had put in an XP install disk then when you saw the SECOND "Repair" question you would activate that. That will normally fix most all XP problems AND save your files. Formatting has to be an absolute last ditch effort.

But from where you are now, the problem seems larger. Windows has nothing to do with booting from a CD. That function is done through your motherboard bios. When you start up and go to your bios setup, do you see the hard drive listed -or- only your CD drive? Assuming the bios does see your hard drive, then change your boot sequence to have the first boot device be the CD drive, and the second boot device as the hard drive. You may have done this but from your description I'm not sure....

The key here is that the bios must see the hard drive, if it doesn't then your hard drive is probably gone!

If you've changed your boot sequence to have the CD first, then when you start the system the bios will read the CD, which will tell the bios to tell you to press any key to start the CD program (should be your XP CD preferably - ME was a loser even in Microsoft's eyes!). If you do see the "Press any key to start from CD" text then do so of course.

IF the CD starts the install, then delete ALL partitions and choose formatting the entire disk as one partition - do a new format regardless that you did one previously. And, of course, use ONLY the ntfs format, don't even consider using the older FAT format that ME would give you.

If XP does install then don't forget to go back into your bios and change your boot sequence back to setting your hard drive as the first boot device.

You may have done all the above and I don't mean to talk down to you, it's just that your description isn't all that detailed.

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