I've not had good luck using restore CDs from one manufacturer on another manufacturer's system. Not to say it won't ever work, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for that approach.

Can you give a few more details? Does the system boot at all? What is the nature of the problem? Is this a desktop or a laptop? Are you looking to wipe the problem box, or fix whatever problem exists? Is there data you need or want to recover? Do you have no keyboard/mouse support?

I once owned an absolutely terrible laptop (Acer: never buy from them). It crashed, hard. More than once. When XP would not boot, I was able to access my data and burn it to CD using a CD-sized linux distro called Knoppix; for me, data recovery was the important part.

If you have a USB thumb drive, you might try making it bootable: look at

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device.../usb-boot.mspx

and

http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardwa...omusbstick.php

Again, try to more fully describe your problem and the desired result.