The later versions of XP will only let you do a clean install if you boot from the disc (CD). Otherwise you will be forced to upgrade or do an install alongside your current files. In order to do this, you must inject a file into your iso. Use Isobuster (or winimage) to extract the entire xp set of files, add xpboot.bin, use ezcd creator five to put it all back together and baam it works. If you need the tutorial(600KB) and the xpboot.bin file (2KB), email me. droopy1592@hotmail.com

so there is no way to create some sort of boot up disk in dos to do a clean install?

As mentioned before you can install XP from the DOS prompt aswell,np. Boot on a Win98 disc. Load smartdrv.exe and switch to your i386 directory of WinXP. Type "winnt" and the installation will start.

Brains...I am running win2k and I want to do a Clean install. I tried running winxp setup from inside win2k and when i tried to delete the partition it wouldnt let me saying "Cannot delete the partition because there are temporary setup files on the drive." I tried doing what you mentioned in your above post and when i ran winnt from the i386 directory the setup screen popped up and gave me an error. It says... An Internal Setup Error Has Occurred. Could Not Find A Place For A Swap File. Setup Cannot Continue. Press ENTER To Exit. Any help with this would be appreciated. Thanks You can email me privately also...BALLAZ408@hotmail.com

Barry; Can you boot from the XP disk, or set your bios to do so? If so, do that and you can do a clean install of XP. Note: you may want to back up your boot drive, and format it so XP will find a nice clean partition to install to. That's what I did with my w2k installation. OTOH the XP setup, if I remember correctly will allow you to format the partition, provided you have booted from the XP disk. If your bios does not allow booting from the CD you can get a program from Microsoft that will create XP boot disks. I can't remember the URL but it should be easy to find. Mind you the boot disk downloads are large, at around 30mb for both the Home and Pro XP setup disk creator programs. Hopefully you won't have to go that route. One other possibility, which I have not tried and tested is to see if the w2k boot disks will allow you to access the CD ....