Windows XP giving me trouble.

[TickleMyElmo]

My brothers girlfriend recently came to me about fixing a pc that was givin to her for free. I opened the case to find out that there was no memory installed. I happened to have some old memory lying around and stuck it in, it worked. Now I turned on the pc and it did not have an operating system on it. Just to let you know, this is an old pc, it's a Pentium 4. On the case it has an XP Home product key. I borrowed an XP Home CD from a friend and let it load up. I delete the partition and try to install the XP Home edition on pc.
It deletes the partition but when I try to install it says something like "warning this partition already has an operating system on it and continuing the installation could cause problems." I don't understand.
What should I do next?

 

[EarthDog]

Install over it like you intended to do in the first place.

 

[TickleMyElmo]

I tried. I seems to install then restarts then brings up the same thing as before.
Also it said something about the registry may be damaged.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I tried. I seems to install then restarts then brings up the same thing as before.
Also it said something about the registry may be damaged.

Wipe the HDD with GParted. (with nwipe or etc)

 

[TickleMyElmo]

Ok, I dl'ed GParted and put it on a cd. After I load it up, what do I do? I tried deleting the partition and changing the file system from exe1 to fat 32 and NTFS. It deleted and reformatted and restarted the pc and it just goes back to the same thing again. I tried installing windows on there and it seemed to work until it restarted and the same blue screen came back up wanting to know what I want to do with the windows cd. Anything else I should try?

 

[wingman99]

It might be your boot order make sure it boots to the hard drive first.

 

[TickleMyElmo]

How do I change the boot order on that ancient thing? lol

 

[EarthDog]

How do I change the boot order on that ancient thing? lol

Same way you would in any PC, in the bios. Its should be in there somewhere... take a look.

Actually, is the drive SATA or IDE?

 

[TickleMyElmo]

IDE

 

[wingman99]

Try rebooting with the windows CD out of the drive.

 

[theELVISCERATOR]

delete the partitions, then create and format them with the windows DVD before install.

Never had to use gparted on scores of xp installs.

 

[TickleMyElmo]

I've tried all the above. It just resets or something. It just doesn't take.

 

[repo man11]

It's beginning to sound as though there was a good reason it was free. Have you looked closely at the motherboard to see if it has any failing (dome shaped tops) capacitors? If it passes inspection, try running Memtest86.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Ok, I dl'ed GParted and put it on a cd. After I load it up, what do I do?

Actually, get Parted Magic, burn that to a CD then:

Click on the icon where it says to erase disk and then it will give a list of wiping utilities to use.