Reinstalling XP how long should it take?

I have been tryin to reinstall Windows XP from the partition on the harddisk and the security CD I made.Everything works well untill the window with xp opens with the time glass and the world "Wait" I have been waiting for over 2 hours.How long sholuld it take? Then I tried to bott from the CD but then i get the follwing message. "Which log in do you want. 1;Ie2386
2:Nt something and H:Windows. If i try the last one they ask for the administrator password which I have lost?? What to do?

 

that is difficult to say, if it is a restore partition, then it would depend on your pc manufacturers instructions and you would not need a cd, just the partition., installing xp should be no more than 30 minutes.

 

I suspect that the partition was corrupted from the beginning. The CD was copied from the partition when I bought the HP Pavillon .As none of these,neither the partition nor the CD is working, there must be something wrong. The HP company does not say anything about the prompt commandos in DOS when i try to boot only from the CD.
I am also wondering why there are no messages.about "error".It just says "Wait" and now it has waited for 8 hours.

Everything worked before but a little bit slow. The reason why I wanted to reinstall was to restore it to the original configuration.

 

if the partition is corrupted, which can happen, then your best bet is to hunt around for a copy of xp of your version , home, pro, or mce and install it , you can use the product key on the sticker attached to pc to validate it.

 

Do a chkdsk on your disk you are installing to - it might just be some error on the
partition. If it does have an error, you'll have to format it losing all the data on it !
If you want to save something put it as a secondary disk on another computer and
save whatever you need !