I do have some computer knowledge. My Question is I have a generic computer and a windows xp disc and I picked up a used hard drive my 80 gb drive failed and is no good. I want to totally wipe this used hard drive clean reformat and load xp. My computer has no floppy drive. It does however have a cd-r/rw drive I would assume i can get some sort of cd I can stick in the drive to do this but. Where does the computer get the driver fo a cd-r. I also know this can be done using the xp disc it aparently has a boot sector on it.
In the BIOS, unless the computer is very old. You can first of all try putting the Windows install disk in the CD drive and rebooting the computer. If this does not work, go into the BIOS settings and enable boot from CD. See here for a useful page showing how to do this and also containing links to other boot disk resources. http://www.windowsreinstall.com/articles/bios/