Sorry

Both statements are contradictory. If you don't even know how to reformat, I highly doubt you are able to enter the BIOS and manipulate it correctly so your system boots from cd first.

I recently had a problem that sounds similar with my Dell--using XP rather than Vista. I called Dell tech support. They charged $75 for a single-problem fix, but were able to talk me through an entire computer wipe and re-install. It took about six hours all together, and I had to get a friend on another computer to download software from the Dell site and bring it to me on a flash drive to reinstall. I am not computer-literate. Gender aside, all my training is in the humanities. If the Dell tech people could talk me through the process, thay can talk anyone through it.

I have since installed Stop-zilla and McAfey(spelling?), and thankfully have not had problems since.

Best wishes!

Update on booting issues, re: booting from anything but the internal hard drive on my computer.

I looked again at the bios settings. I do have an option to boot from an internal IDE hard drive. Of which there are none listed. Not even the CD-RW and DVD-RW drive are considered internal IDE devices. I can also boot from an internal SATA device. There is one of those. The hard drive. Only other boot options are USB devices, so that is an allowed option. To use the included CD- or DVD-RW drives though, will require connecting them in some other arbitrarily determined method, not the way they ARE connected.