Thread: trying to get rid of vista for xp

I have a dell xps 410 that came with windows vista home premium. I cant stand vista any more, i thought that i would give it a chance but after almost a year i have had it. I have tried to create a separte hard drive partition and tried to boot windows xp cd from the drive and windows starts down the install path but before it finishes i get a blue screen telling me that a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to my comp. it says to check for viruses, which I have done and that is a negative, remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. which i have not done either of those, check hard drive to make sure that it is properly configured and terminated, whatever that means, and to run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart my computer. I cannot figure out how to run the CHKDSK, I am mostly computer illiterate when it comes to command prompt. Someone told me to just f disk the HD but I dont know what that means. When I am at the command prompt how do i run the chkdsk from (C:\Users\john>) if I just type in CHKDSK /F then i get a message that reads, Access Denied as you do not have sufficient privilages. You have to invoke this utility running in elavated mode. Whatever that means. Can anyone help me? I am ready to go office space on this tower but then my wife sould shoot me because I begged her to let me get a new desk top.