Good day, I'm building a computer for my son. I want to load xp pro on to it; it's one of the early xp pro which needs 6 floppies to start loading. The hard drive I have has some rubbish on it which prevents cd from starting after loading the floppies.
I only have a laptop running at present, is there a program I can burn on my laptop to format my hard drive? Sorry for being long winded couldn't think of another way of putting it. Thanks Al

Al,
I would suggest Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://www.dban.org/) to wipe the hard drive. You would download it on a good computer and create a DBAN floppy disk. Then, put it in your son's computer and boot it up. It should nuke the hard-drive for you.

Hope this helps,
WallyH

Have you checked the BIOS to see if it is set to boot to cd first?

Try this:

Ok, download file below (it is safe, it is my file and upload) To download file, click link below and click Free User on the left and download should start in 25 secs.

This download is a bootable floppy disk with CD Rom support
RapidShare: Easy Filehosting (http://rapidshare.com/files/108136578/Startup_Disk.rar)

-Open file with Winrar or Winzip, whatever you use to open .rar files and there is a temp directory

-Copy all the files in the temp folder onto a blank formatted floppy disk so that the only things you have on the floppy disk are the files that were in the temp folder

-Now you need to put the floppy disk in and your XP CDin the computer you want to install windows to, now restart your computer

You should come to a DOS prompt

-Type d:
Hit enter

-Type setup and hit enter, this should enter you into the XP set up program

I have virus in da comp... I can't complete da setup so hw can I format it??

How to Format Drive and Install Windows from Scratch
http://lifehacker.com/software/windows/geek-to-live-how-to-format-your-hard-drive-and-install-windows-xp-from-scratch-157578.php