Here's a "wrinkle": What's the best way to do a clean install of XP Home on a machine that currently has XP Pro on it? Last time I tried (booting from the XP Home CD-ROM) it gave me a hard time about "reverse upgrading", I eventually got it to work using Advanced Options, but I was not confident! The hard drive was formatted NTFS, one partition (the whole drive). Is there an easy way to FDISK or reformat? Any help appreciated!

you said that you tried booting from the xp disc and it gave you a hard time. Did you do a reinstall or a new install? It should have been simple to just reformat the hdd and install fresh xp. Be sure the boot sequence in the BIOS is changed to boot from cd first and when it prompts to hit any key to boot to cd...do it fast. then follow directions to reformat the drive.It is really that simple , regardless what operating systen you have.

I booted from the CD-ROM then tried to do a new install as I remember. I have the BIOS set for boot sequence as follows: IDE-0, CD-ROM, Floppy. I press F8 when it boots and it lets me "press enter to boot from CD-ROM". The XP Home CD-ROM detected that the hard drive already had XP Pro installed, and advised that it would not install XP Home (a downgrade) unless I selected Advanced Options. Which I did, removed and recreated the partition I think - I don't think it reformatted though. It seemed to go alright, but I wondered if I could have used an old FDISK on a bootable floppy to remove the partition, or whether the NTFS file structure would misbehave with an old FDISK command. I'm doing a second one just the same very soon, and will document it more closely. But believe me,(or try it yourself and see), MS Windows XP takes exception to the attempt at "down-version". More "Piracy Paranoia" by Bill & Co.? It's quite legitimate, I had two machines loaded with legal XP Pro licenses which I now need to reload with legal XP Home licenses. And, come to think of it, the first one has some issues after I reloaded it - mouse seems sluggish, maybe running slow, and scheduled Norton events (One button checkup, Antivirus scan, Automatic Liveupdate) aren't occurring - even though they do appear on "Scheduled Events". Maybe the OS reinstall didn't go right after all, which is why I'd rather fix it so the new install will just let me "start from scratch" with a fresh, typical install. Any help?

If this a single partition drive, it may be simpler/easier to use the '98 bootdisk Fdisk util to delete the partition. If it's ntfs it shows up as non-DOS under Fdisk inspections. Once the partition has gone reconfigure drive afresh and even preformat (as fat32). Then run XP setup etc. If you want it as ntfs then you can reformat the target partition during setup or convert fat32 to ntfs later? Suggest you create both Primary & Extended partitions; Primary for OS/apps/utils etc., Extended for data only. With data in its own partition you can safely re-install to Primary (even to reformat it if need-be) without affecting data - unless one is really careless... Fdisk (M$ versions) will only remove ntfs from, Primary partitions - not from Extended areas. DR-DOS version is said by some folks to remove ntfs from Extended as well (haven't tried DR-DOS version, so can't comment further). Delpart.exe is the other way to remove ntfs from wherever it resides.

hello you can format the drive useing the xp cd and booting to recovery consol. and to see how read this link. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q307654