[ringster]

I will try and be brief and clear...

Yesterday I bought myself a new computer and in blissful ignorance accepted the fact that it was a "bare" machine. So i thought i'd be able to set it up myself but...

First of all i partitoned the drive (FAT32) and then formatted the drive (This was done with the only boot disk that i had that seemed to be able to work - a floppy win 98se - subsequently, i am learning fast here, i checked the BIOS and saw the preferred disk was the floppy but i am jumping ahead here...)

(i have in my possession a windows 98se boot disk floppy, a windows 98se cd and windows xp cd that i downloaded yesterday from microsoft.)

I then put the boot disk in again and tried to set up Windows98 (with the aim of then upgrading 98 to XP once i had 98 up and running - although obviously i tried to run the XP disk directly but nothing was happening...)

Windows failed to reboot after set up was completed - the problem is that the memory is too large (Windows failed to initiailze) because 98 only supports up to 512mb and my computer has more - the solution? go into system.ini via safe mode command prompt and change the MaxPhysPage but all i have in the system.ini is a blank blue page and no text!

I am completely new to all of what i have written here and fully accept that i have probably not done some preliminary step which would have allowed me to boot windowsxp directly and now i have gone down a windows98 cul-de-sac... so my question is, How can i step back from the 98 debacle and boot windowsxp?

[ringster]

problem has been resolved!