Hd is Maxtor 40gb DiamondMax Plus 8. Used a Win98 floppy to fdisk and format(and wipe out a previous installation of XP Pro) my drive into primary and one extended partition (NTFS). The problem is that when I go to Win Explorer it shows the c: as the empty partition and the D: as the primary with OS. Thinking that a simple Rename would fix the problem I foolishly tried it. Now, I have, in sequence, Local Drive (C:)(D:) and the next drive is Local Drive (D:)(C:). What a mess. When I look at the Properties of the drives the OS knows which drive is which, IE: The D: C: drive is actually the C: drive and the computer boots to XP Home fine. And the C: D: drive knows it is the extended partition drive and knows it is empty. They are just listed wrong in Windows Explorer. I feel that the only way to regain the proper sequence listing of the hard drives is to totally wipe off the HD, reformat as one large NTFS drive, and reinstall XP Home. I have tried a Win98 Bootdisk, then Fdisk to absolutely no avail. Fdisk refuses to delete the extended partition even though I went through the procedure, as I understand it, by deleting the Logical Drive within the extended partition. Heeeelllpp! How can I just wipe out all the partitions, whatever they are, reformat into one large NTFS partition, and reinstall XP Home????

assuming you have a bootable cd rom just insert xp disk and run setup. xp setup can create/delete/format partitions on the fly during setup.

As I type this I am trying your suggestion. But guess what. A window pops up saying "go to Control Panel to install and configure system components". I do not believe that is going to accomplish a deletion of all the partitions and reformat my HD. But I am sure open to suggestions at this point. BTW, I am using an upgrade CD.

what happens when you reboot machine with xp disk in cd rom drive? sorry i wasn't clear before but that is why i mentioned bootable drive (means you can boot from cd instead of hard disk). you should get a message something like 'press any key to boot from cd'. if you can then just follow on screen prompts. at some point you should get an option to delete all partitions and create a new one. i have no experience of using an upgrade cd so this option may mot be available. if not then use a file called gdisk.exe which i have sent to your inbox. this is a command line utility far superior to fdisk. copy it to a bootable floppy and execute the following command- gdisk 1 /del /all there are no confirmation dialogs so if you press enter, that's it - your disk is wiped. next type gdisk 1 /cre /pri /for /q this will format your drive with the fat32 system ready for windows 98 installation. reboot machine. you will then need a floppy with cd rom drivers to install 98. you can then use your xp upgrade disk to install xp afterwards.