- IBM-307030 30 GB HD - Older "Award BIOS" - about 3 years old, never upgraded - Just wiped HD and realized that the bios won't read my CD Drives for XP Boot CD. I installed win 98 (amazing I even had it!) via a floppy drive to gain access to the cd drives, then loaded win XP via a CD Drive. Now my problem is that I can not partition my HD in the WinXP setup utility. It will not create a new partition or even delete the 28MB partition that Win98 created. Help greatly appreciated. Ryan

Hey Ryan... Hang in, you're almost there, you got the right idea and info, just in the wrong order. XP can't partition the drive because it is existing on it. It would have to erase itself to do it. First, you have to clean down the disk; use your WIN98 boot floppy to boot into DOS; go into the fdisk utility, and remove, in this order, first any Logical drives, Next any Extended Partitions, and finally your Primary partition. Be sure it is in that order or you will have problems after. Make sure that in Fdisk Option #5 Does NOT show; if it does, you still have some old garbage that has to be removed. Now your disk is clean. I will assume you want only one partition, so create one partition (eg: the entire disk) and make it active and primary. Do Not Format. Exit out of Fdisk into the DOS prompt; switch to your CDROM drive, slip in your XP disk, and type setup.exe. You are on your way. You now should be able to format NTFS or FAT32 (NTFS is better for XP).

Excellent! Thanks very much!!!

Great! Glad it worked. Now you are an expert at low-level formatting.