I'm pretty sure you are going to need the disc mate.
I had the problem on my computer where I managed to scratch the disc making it unuseable. I used the disc from my dad's computer, and as long as you enter the serial number for the laptop you will be fine. Just make sure you use an XP home disc!
Put the disc in, restart the computer. It will say press a key to boot from cd. Do that, go through a few menus, select install new version of windows on drive C, it will then say there is already a version of windows on there, do you want to continue. Say yes, then on the next screen, it will ask you to format. Do the NTFS full format. When windows is all up and running again, make sure the updates are switched on, and download the free avast virus scanner.
Rich
