erased hard drive and now nothing works

[beachbum_angel]

I started having problems with things not wanting to stay running, had to reboot to get them going again- i was running norton system works 2005, i ran a clean up, a defrag, and a dosnitic, i ran a spybots s&d. NOthing seemed to help it.  Then my usb ports stopped responding and every time i would attempt to put something on them (thumb drives) would reboot me. I attempted to  reformat computer (been about a yr since I did it) I run windows xp professional, on a 900 mh MS Athlon processor that is 7 yrs old.   When I got to the pt where it asked me if i wanted to re-partition  or remove (think was wording) I said remove. (which is what I thought I did last time.) Now it will do nothing.  When I put in disk (XP) , it goes to underscore flashing and says hit any key to reboot, which I do then it starts running information on lower left side saying (setup is loading files  gets to a kernal something sometimes , other times goes to windows executive and hangs up.  Do I need to get a new hard drive? Am I not holding my mouth right (lol)?  What do I do?

thanks Angela

[honvetops]

Welcome to computerhope.com !!   

I'm not 100% sure what you actually have done or did, you can wait for a more educated response or  possibly read below: 

[IF YOU HAVE  a floopy drive installed on your computer >

I'll take a stab here , at least we won't screw it up any worse.
1. if you can get into the  bios, make sure your 1st option for boot-up is "floppy"
 2. if you can't, we can try to do a floppy boot and hope it takes........
 3. Windows XP  should take 6 blank floppies for a boot-disk(s)  array
 4. if you don't have any, go and borrow a puter with a floopy and download the file to that computer.............

  Windows XP Professional Utility: Setup Disks for Floppy Boot Install

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=55820edb-5039-4955-bcb7-4fed408ea73f&displaylang=en

label your disks  1-thru-6   and  when your ready, stick disk one in your computer and then turn it on.............  hopefully this might get you up and running....
     

[soybean]

Has that computer ever been opened and cleaned inside?  If not, it's probably full of dust that's restricting air flow and causing it to run too hot.  Overheating might be the cause of "things not wanting to stay running, had to reboot to get them going again".