I was trying to follow

“How do I wipe the disk and install XP”,

and have started the wipe procedure by putting in my XP disk. I have my BIOS set on first boot device as CD-ROM. but it’s coming up straight away that I have a hard drive configuration problem.

I have no ideas on how I can fix this, and its a 1 month old computer.

Tim Allen

Tim Allen, Bunnings, Dural, NSW

Tim, this is one of those circumstances where the full text of any error message you're encountering would help. Given that your question relates to a hardware problem it would have also been helpful for you to include details of the hardware components in your PC.

More general advice is about all we can provide, I’m afraid, and I’d suggest you follow the advice given in “Adding an extra hard disk” to check that your drives are configured as they should be. Remember, too, that if the hard drive you're using is an IDE drive rather than a SATA drive, it may well be one of your optical drives which is misconfigured.

Cheers,

Terry O'Shanassy