Originally Posted By: DBMaster
Are you knowledgeable enough to enter the BIOS menu and set your CD/DVD drive to be first in the boot priority list? If you can do that with the Windows installation disc in the drive it should offer you the option to install, which will being with an option to format the hard drive. There are so many minor differences in the procedure that it's hard to offer hard guidance, but that's what I've done in the past.
Thanks, I did all that, no help, I did stumble on the boot manager and through it found some other things. Last night I used the MS dl tool to create a bootable usb drive with 8.1 on it. Stuck it and tried to boot it. That failed with an error about having the wrong file format. Some 3 letter thing that I never heard of before. Somewhere in there I found an option to format it and did so. Still had that 3 letter thing and no option to format to hpfs. So tried the install with the original 8.1 disks, and it seems to be working now. It's dl'ing all the updates, so as soon as I get into the machine, I'll turn off the wifi, then go through all the debugging as offered above. Back in a bit.