xp giving me major headaches!

[quechubin]

okay, my dad got a virus on his computer that would not let him start windows 98 up. so he traveled down from ill to texas to visit and so that we could work on his computer. i asked at another forum and someone told me to get a windows 98 emergency start up disk, start up the comp, say yes to using cd rom support, switch the a: prompt to c: promt and then type fdisk. he then told me to check it so that it would utilize drives larger than 2 gigs and to use FAT 32. then he told me to exit fdisk and at the c: prompt to type format c:. then he said to change my bios to boot up from the cd first and then put the windows xp cd in and restart. i did everything and when i put in the windows xp cd, it says that it is going to install some file called windows executive (or something to that nature) and then it gives me an error. the error says that it could not get the ntkernal something or another. i'm not too sure since i didn't write it down. also i tried using the windows xp boot disks that i downloaded from the microsoft web site. when i put in the first disk it says that there was an I/O error. what is that? anyways, how can i get around this so that windows xp will install on my dads computer? i'm trying to install windows xp professional. any and all help would be greatly appreciated. thank you all in advance.

 

[Lonman]

The IO error in the boot floppies means the floppy or the drive is bad... hopefully the floppy. Try to make another set.

 

[jw50]

You can also try copying all of the files from the XP CD to the hard drive and try installing from the hard drive.

 

[brunner]

The problem could be more serious than that. I got the same I-O error trying to read a floppy, but the floppy was readable in ms-dos, or even in XP after reinstalling.