Help with XP restore discs

follow up:

when I put these discs in, everything is too simplified and I believe the only option the user has is to keep clicking "next" at the commands. It just restores the OS to the factory settings, using all of the hard drive as 1 partition. How do I get around this? This is XP Pro.

You'll need a proper disk management utility. I recommend Partition Magic 8.0. If you do it properly you should be able to alter your partition settings without losing your data. Just make sure you know what you're doing.

Barton 2500+, 512MB Corsair Platinum XMS 3200 CL2, Radeon 9700, WD Raptor 10,000 rpm S-ATA HDD, Asus A7V600, Enermax 460W SilentPlus PSU.

Do you think if it will work if I use a win98 bootdisk to partition the drive, then use compaq's version of XP to change fat32 to ntfs and put their OS on?

No. You'd lose all the data on the disk, and I'm not sure whether the Compaq restore disks will do a full clean install of Windows XP on your system.

Barton 2500+, 512MB Corsair Platinum XMS 3200 CL2, Radeon 9700, WD Raptor 10,000 rpm S-ATA HDD, Asus A7V600, Enermax 460W SilentPlus PSU.

It's possible you have a full XP install on those discs somewhere, especially given that you have two CDs. If you post the directory structure of the discs here, maybe we'll be able to help you track it down.