Okay, I am really getting aggrivated. I have been trying to wipe out this hard drive and have not succeeded. I have put in my 98 boot disk and tried the fdisk and it tells me it's invalid or something. I also tried doing it with the xp install disk and I get up to the part about the partitions but yet it won't let me delete either of my partitions. Then when I rewrite over the first partition.... it didn't wipe it out all it did was re install the windows xp. Anyone have any ideas?

I've only formatted with XP once so far (lucky me), so I'll say how I did it and it worked though there are certainly other options. I went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the XP Pro boot disk (if you have Home, then download the Home boot disk). I say boot disk but when you install it it takes 6 disks. Anyways, after you make the 6 disks, just put the first one in the floppy drive and reboot. It will do its thing loading the disks into memory, then give you an option to go to recovery console. I went to recovery console and typed format c: /fs:nfts and that was it. Done. Now if you can boot from your CDROM, then it may be easier just to put the XP cd in the cdrom and boot to it and format it from there.

If your Hard drive is ntfs then fdisk may have a problem trying to format it I have had that problem what I did was use the manufactures floppy and do a low level format if you dont have one go to the web site and download one after I did that I had no problems using the fdisk to set up the hard drive. If you go to google there are web sites that will give you step by step instructions for doing it

the Win98 boot disk will be fine for you - I fdisked a FAT32 Disk and an NTFS disk with it. Just make sure that when you get into Fdisk that you display the partition information first.. Then, delete from the extented partions back to the root. When you are all done, put in the XP CD and reboot. It should recognize that there's nothing on teh disk and start 'fresh'. good luck! Mike

get ' delpart.exe ' fro M$, it will delete any partition you want