Hi, I have xp on my computer now but I want to format the hard drive and do a clean install. I'm not sure my computer will boot from cd-rom (I have a Dell Dimension XPS T500), so I was wondering how I can format the hard drive and create a boot disk (what files do I need for the boot disk and the reformat?). Thanks for your help.

Why don’t you first see if it will boot from the CD. I would do that before you format. Start up and press ‘DELETE’ when it’s loading and go into BIOS. Go through the menus until you find the boot sequence. It will be ‘floppy’ as first boot device, temporarily change it to CDROM as first boot device and save. See if it will boot with your XP CD. Change back to floppy afterwards. Boot disk If you have Win98 on your system, Control panel / add remove programs / Windows setup / create start up disk. Test that as well, see if it will boot to A: prompt p.s If it won’t boot from CD make sure you can access your CD drive from your boot disk.

And remember to load a smartdrv.exe from the bootdisk...otherwise the WinXP installation won't start.

best bootdisk ive found is win me bootdisk or win98 should do it, I don't think you can make a windows xp bootdisk,when you first installed windows xp did you change your file system from fat32 to ntfs? if you did you can't format c drive unless you delete that partition and reformat hd, gl