Major problems please help

[Jeanie]

I have a  PIII gateway. I was having trouble and it told me to reinstall WindowsXP. So I did and now it will not leave safe mode and it will not install XP. I can not get any further with anything on the computer except where it say can not install under safe mode. So I tried to just wipe the hard drive and start all over, it will not let me do anything now.. I can not delete from the hard drive in DOS mode, but when I do a dir it shows everything is still on the hard drive. Wondering if I had a bad hard drive or mother board or if I am way off and need to try something else.. please help....

[Joleen]

Have you changed the bios to boot off the cd?  Is your XP an upgrade or full version.

[Brendan]

First you will need to boot from the CD rom if your bios allows this. This will allow you to use the XP recovery options. You can do one of three things, have XP try to fix your problems or go in to the recovery console and try to fix your problems with a limited set of dos commands if you know exactly what the problem is. Lastly and probably what you want to do is the option to do a fresh install of XP.

So get that cd rom booted and life should be much better.