Question on my Laptop

I have an Asus laptop and I'm trying to reformat the whole thing. I have the original disks and all, but I'm stuck. I have looked it up online at multiple sites, but I feel like I'm missing something somewhere. It says to enter the disk, then choose to boot from the CD drive. When I do that, it just starts up like normal. Do I have to use command prompt to format my drive first or something, and then boot from the CD? Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but I figured it would be the closest to be able to get some help from people that can actually talk to me.

Thanks,
Chrispy

Most modern laptops have a key that you can press while the computer is booting up to acces a boot menu to allow booting from a disc drive.

Usually its while the manufacturer logo is being displayed you have to press either F1, tab, delete, sometimes shift + F1, F11, F12, etc. Its different for each manufacturer. Just start hammering some of those keys while your laptop boots up.

If none of those solutions work, you'll have to enter the BIOS (usually one of those same keys) and manually change the boot order to make the disc drive go first before the hard drive.

You are probably best of putting the disc while in windows, running the setup process and letting it reboot through that mini-installer.