1- i'm italian, so sorry for my errors in this post 2- i have a 40 Gb hard disk with winXP installed I used Partiton Magic 7 to create a primary partition (FAT) of 100 Mb BEFORE the partiton where is installed winXP (so it's inside the famous 1024 cylinder). then i reboot the computer with the DOS installation disk #1 inserted. the installation program says that the hard disk is unable to receive DOS because a partition needs to be formatted. the problem is that it wants to format the WHOLE hard disk. How can i format ONLY the 100 Mb partition? (obviously winXP doesn't recognize this partition) thanks for any help

Start with a boot disk and type in FORMAT C: use this with a dos 6.2 bootdisk.

and how can i create a dos 6.2 bootdisk? sorry for my ignorance

Download a boot disk from bootdisk.com if you wish.You will find one of the MS-DOS 6.22 group. I don't think that the disk one of your install set can format more than the C drive :it is the same as using the boot disk.It will format to install the OS.It has to if it is not done yet.Good luck.

" then i reboot the computer with the DOS installation disk #1 inserted. the installation program says that the hard disk is unable to receive DOS because a partition needs to be formatted. the problem is that it wants to format the WHOLE hard disk. " As Kurt stated, with a DOS 6.x boot disk the only partition "seen" by that disk will be the FAT partition. It will be the only partition "seen", thus to that boot disk (DOS 6.x), it's your C: drive. When running in the XP O/S, your C: drive is the XP partitions. If your boot disk is indeed a DOS 6.x, go ahead and let it format the whole drive, which will be the 100 MB partition only.