Need help booting from Windows XP SP1 CD

[ben johnson]

The other day I was volunteered to fix an old compaq computer, which is the last thing I want to do, but like I said I was volunteered and now I have no choice. Its an old compaq laptop that has a floppy and cd rom drive. Windows is a mess and desperately needs to be reformatted and reinstalled. So I pop the windows xp sp1 cd and proceed to restart. Once it starts booting up it just went straight to the hard drive and won't boot from the CD. I went into the bios and made sure the boot sequence was in the right order and it was. I couldnt get it to boot from the CD at all, so I tried making the windows xp sp1 bootable floppy disks. It wont boot from the floppy either. So I decided to put in Knopix which is a linux based operating system that is ran completely off of a CD. It booted right off of the knopix CD. So I have no idea what to do. Now when I boot up the laptop without a CD in it, its just says "operating system not found". So basically I cant get it to boot off of anything except the knopix CD. Its all screwed up now and I have no idea what I did. If someone could help me get this laptop to boot off of a windows XP cd that would be awesome.

Thanks a ton for your help. I really appreciate it.

[liquidtrance123]

MS made a SP1 only cd, there is no OS on it, its just a Service Pack, make sure you have the full OS on there, just a thought. :D

[djnes]

Yeah, you should specify which CD your talking about. There are corporate editions of XP (and maybe retail as well) with XP (SP1 slipstreamed in) and then there are CDs that are just the Service Pack...not the OS. If it's just the service pack CD, then it's not bootable. It's meant to update PCs already running XP. Which CD is it that you have?