Hello,

Please advise me if you can, it will be much appreciated.

I need to reformat my home pc. I put in my XP disc and restart, then F8 etc for the boot menu.

But.

At the 'Press enter to boot from CD' prompt, when I press Enter - CD Shell pops up.

My problem is - I have no idea what CD Shell is or does (I purchased this computer 2nd hand), I just want to reformat but cannot get my disc to boot because CD Shell comes up.

What do I do? Can I get rid of CD Shell and if so, how?
Do I need it for anything?

Please help -
Toastaholic.

You are booting off your CD disk, CD Shell is a boot system for CDs.
What is the disk supposed to be?

Hello d4vr0s - thanks for reading and replying

The CD is TinyXP. How can I do my reformat?
Thanks in advance,
Toastaholic

TinyXP is warez and is not supported on these forums. Persue this any further on these forums and you will be banned. The only way is to install from a legally obtained copy of XP. If you have one of these then we will be willing to help you.

reformat pc for TinyXP lay off the toast big-man.

Hi paraglider
Sorry, I was unaware re that. I do have an original (legal) xp copy, but was told this was faster. I don't mind which one I use so I'm happy to leave the tiny version

The question remains, do I need CD shell and how can I get past it?

Thanks again to everyone for your help

Does CDshell still show if you boot from the XP install CD? If CD shell is showing it should show a menu allowing you to choose the XP install.

If you are booting from CD no need to press F8 to boot from CD. As long as the boot order is set correctly in the bios so that CD boot is before hard disk boot then you should see the Press Any key message directly.

If CD shell still shows when you boot from XP install CD please post a directory listing of your XP install CD. Just the root directory should be enough.

CD Shell will not show on a legitimate windows cd.
You should see a 'Press any key to boot from CD' prompt, and if you do then it should boot and give you the options to install/repair etc.

Sorry guys - I think I need to get back to my original question,
Do I need CD Shell? (I don't like excess on my pc)
If not, how is it uninstalled?

Thanks again for your help
Toast

@Toastaholic

CDSHELL is as the name implies, a CD shell.

I have never seen it installed on a Hard Disk, as it only supports CDFS (or ISO9660, if you prefer) filesystem, so, unless thare is a heavily modified version around, it is impossible.

An original XP disk WILL NOT have CD Shell.

As long as you do not boot from the CD that uses CD Shell, you will never see it.

So, what is the problem?

jaclaz