i put in the floppy disk and went through the 3 recovery disks at the end it says please remove the floppy disk and press any key to continue when i do this i just get a black screen with a flashing cursor on the top left i have tried this several times could the pc just be knackered as it is quite old thanks in advance

How about explaining it a bit more?

would help if we knew what you were trying to recover from?

Usually with recovery disks the part where they tell you to remove and press any key is where it should boot from the harddrive. First check that you do not have a cd in the cd drive. Check in bios that your boot order is floppy first then harddrive. When using recovery floppys you should make sure you only have the original hardware, unplug any printer, usb device, modem etc, replace any new hardware with the original if you can (if you have changed your video card etc)

Check your ram (try using a program like memtest)

Firstly depending on what system you have you should be able to reinstall Windows without the recovery disks, This Process will delete all the data on your hard drive.

1st we want to turn on the computer, put the Windows XP disk in the CD-ROM.

We then need to restart the machine and we want to enter the boot sequence menu this is normally done by either F5 or F12.

Then we want to select Boot from CD-ROM. The machine will restart and boot from the CD-ROM instead of the hard drive.

If pressing F5 or F12 does not bring you into the Boot Sequence then you will need to enter the BIO, so restart the computer and press Del key on keyboard, you want to go to the boot Sequence in the BIOS settup. Then change the way it boots from this:

1:Floppy
2:HDD
3:CD-ROM
4:Unused

To This

1:CD-ROM
2:Floppy
3:HDD
4:Unsed

Then you need to save and exit the BIOS (Basic input/Output System).

The system will reload and boot from the CD-ROM

Hurray lol

Now it will start to load a load of Script like .DLL file Kernal Debugger etc, let all this load and it will ask you what you want to do install to a new partion, repair xp etc.

Select to install to a new partion it will something like Partioned Space C: and then like unpartioned space 4MB as an example. Select the top option partioned c: and delete this partion you will get a warning message saying you will loose all your info when you do this agree. Then select the partion with the most amount of MB as there will be 2 partions one with a large amount of space and one with a few MB's (Mega Bytes). Then Hit F8 to agree to MS terms and Condtions and follow the instructions on the screen.

Then Install all drivers again for the Graphics card motherboard, Sound USB download SP2 from MS website to get all your USB's and then you'll need to install all applications anti virus games etc etc

Hope it Helps if you need any more info mail me