>>>I have a couple XP Pro disks. I have tried to reinstall a number of times using both disks onto different boxes. What happens is I get to the part where I'm supposed to press F8 to confirm to the agreement, and nothing happens. Nada. If I hit other keys - just for kicks - I get a blue screen with errors. I can't recall now what it was, but it basically meant I was toast and had to hard boot to get out. I have used both these OS disks in the past successfully, and even on one of the boxes that it fails on now. Any ideas?
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>>Googling the text of the BSOD should get you the answer. If you get a lot of hits you can narrow it down with one or more of the error codes that are returned as well e.g. 0x000000cd
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>>One wild guess - IIRC early versions of XP Pro didn't come with SATA drivers. So, if you are installing to an SATA hard drive, you need to download the appropriate driver to a floppy disk, and during the XP Setup CD boot press F6 when prompted to load that driver:
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>>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314859
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>>Also, IIRC there can be issues installing early versions of XP on disks larger than 137GB:
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>>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013
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>>One workaround for this latter issue is to create the system partition to be less than 137GB and install XP on that, then create another partition (e.g. E:) using the remainder of the drive.
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>One of the hard drives has some proprietary stuff going on where it says that you can't install the OS without using the original restore disks. I don't want to install all the crap that came with it. Is there a way to wipe the hard drive without using the OS install? In the old days I would have done FORMAT C:, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

XP Setup has a basic partition manager built-in. With that, you can delete any partitions that already exist on the HD, then tell Setup to install XP on the "unpartitioned space".