vista boot problems

ok so i actually run windows xp on my computer and i wanted to get vista. so my girlfriend was trying to be sneaky and suprise me by installing vista on my computer. sweet huh. anyway she has a lap top that came with vista already installed so she thought that she could put in her application cd that came with her laptop and clean my computer for a fresh boot with her operations disk. well since she did this my computer will not get past the dell sign when i boot up after the dell sign it just shows a little blinking line in the top left corner. i have tried to use my xp disk to reboot but when i pick to run from cd it tells me to press f1 to retry boot or press f2 for system utilitys. i have no idea how to fix this i have even tried running boot disks and data recovery doctors and nothing happens. can some one get me going in the right direction. thanks

You really aren't supposed to use the same instillation disk on two different computers. I think it is a bit illegal (correct me if I'm wrong). If you have a desktop HP and she has a laptop Dell, that also may not work out too well. What are the make and model's of the computers?

I also hope you had all of your personal documents off of there, installing a new OS completely wiped your hard drive.

its a dell dimension 8110 desktop

...and what's her laptop?

her notebook is a dell inspiron 1525

Is it possible to get to your files to make a backup? If so, you may want to do a clean reinstall if XP. I'm more of a desktop person, so I don't know how drastic (if at all) the changes would be in the different instillation disks.

i have all my files already backed up, i have tried to do a clean install from my xp disk but i cant boot from a disk

As far as I know, If you can't boot from a disk you can't do too much .

Can you boot from anything? (Floppy?)

i dont have a floppy drive on my desktop

Can you get one? They arn't that expensive and can plug into a usb port.