ok well what happened was i bought a new hard drive for my laptop and i backed up my old one to an external hard drive then i installed the new one then started to retrieve the backed up data but during that time apparently my laptop wasnt plugged into its power source and died while i went to the movies. now when i try to boot up it just gives errors and i try putting my windows xp installation disk in and it says press any key to continue i do that and it just goes to black screen.the disk is in perfect condition...so i was wondering if there was a way to clean it completely without paying a big amount for someone to do it for me. it still loads into bios. ohh yeah its a dell inspiron 2650 laptop w/60GB hitachi HD
change in the bios the boot sequence from hd to cd/dvd. when booting off the xp cd, it should give you the option to delete the partition & make a new partition then format that new partition.