The best way for your friend to install XP is to go into the bios and set the boot order so that it will boot from CD first and HDD second. Then place your XP disk in the drive and reboot. You'll be able to reformat the HDD iwhilst in the install options at the beginning of the install. Once you've installed the os don't forget to change the boot order back. As for drivers, the laptop manufacturers website should have them available for download so maybe you could download them for him while he installs the os. Hope this answers your query..

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