restoring my moms "crashed" pc

[ericandlucy]

I am trying to restore my mothers old pc it's an HP pavillion 7935 when I first turned it on it said "operating system not found" so I tried loading the OS from her new PC but it wouldnt read the cd drive. so i created a boot disk and that got me into DOS mode. this is where i am currently stuck I cant get it to read the cd drive and when i type C:\>DIR it lists 22 files @ 238k bytes w/ 821.47MB free its a 40GB drive so where is everything. I have tried several other commands but with my very basic knowledge of pc's i get confused please help I will be online trying to figure this out ,

[ericandlucy]

the original OS is windows xp, I tried loading XP but i cant figure out how to get it to read the cd drive. drives A:/>, and B:/> are both reading the floppy drive

[JimP]

Hi, A Boot disk that you made is not likely to have the CD setup. Sounds like the comp is too old to have a boot with CD and most 98 install CDs don't auto boot anyway. They do Auto Run if the system is going. XP does auto boot. Get a 98 Boot disk from a buddy or download one. A fair one is called MAD BOOT. They will setup the CD and tell you what drive letter was assigned. You can then run the install CDs Setup.Exe. The disk from another machine will probably not have the correct Mother Board drivers, but you can download those from the maker or driversguide.com. Luck, Jim