Bean,
put the XP cd in first and then reboot the pc. First, see if it allows you to boot to the cd already. Then you don't need to go in BIOS. When the pc reboots, a screen should come up before windows loads that says
"Press any key to boot from the cd"
or something to that effect. Press any key (not
the any key
) and it should take you to the XP Install.
If you don't see that screen and it boots right to windows, you'll have to change the boot sequence in your BIOS settings. Reboot the pc again and when the first screen pops up, hit delete. IF that doesn't work, try F2. This should take you into BIOS setup. Every BIOS setup is different but look around for something called Boot Sequence. Make sure that CD-ROM is in the sequence BEFORE Hard Disk Drive. I.E. it will probably look something like this:
Primary Boot Device: IDE CD-ROM
Secondary Boot Device: Floppy Disk Drive
Tertiary Boot Device: Hard Disk Drive
Save the settings and your pc will reboot. Now you should be able to boot to the xp cd.
If this STILL doesn't work, then either you have a cd-rom that isn't bootable or the cd itself is not bootable. In this case, microsoft has a boot disk for XP that actually consists of 6 separate boot disks.
Hope this helped.