my aim is too completely wipe the hard drive and install xp home on it. Ive been tryin this for the last few days with no success. This is the process which i have been doin. using xp boot disk i fdisk, delete primary dos partition then create primary dos partition in FAT32. select yes to maxmimum disk space. Reboot and then format the partition using the format c: command. Then i switch over to the xp home cd, navigate to the i386 directory, then the winnt.exe. I select not to convert to NTFS. then install xp home, can someone tell me if this process looks ok? Cheers Martin

also, my hard drive is 10gb and i did enable large disk support.

All sounds a bit complicated to me, download the Xp boot floppies from Microsoft, use those to boot to Xp setup, then you can delete/format any or all partitions. A darn sight easier.

the xp boot floppys dont seem to work on my computer thats why i had to use an alternative. I can get to the xp install process fine, im just trying to find out if im pre paring the drive correctly for xp, is FAT32 ok? Large disk support? etc

Everything looks fine, Xp will do it all for you anyway. FAT32 isn't quite as good as NTFS, as NTFS accesses the hard drive quicker. People have had problems with it though, but personally i've never had a problem, the choice is yours.

What i mean by "Xp will do it all" is that you don't need to "prepare" your hard disk. At setup Windows will ask you which file system you would like to use (FAT32 or NTFS). It will also let you create partitions or format your drive.

ok cheers, well its copying the files off the xp disk now, so ill just sit back and pray :)