Formatting harddisk with Win XP

[smiller]

OK then, I want to start afresh and format my hard disk and reinstall XP afterwards, however...

...I dont know how you go about formatting a hard disk with XP installed, what with there being no DOS. I only have ( and only want) the one partition, which is currently in NTFS, and I want to keep it like that.

Ive tried using the format command using the Windows Recovery Console, with and without the parameters, but after 10 seconds of saying yes to the warning, it returns to C:\WINDOWS having done nothing.

Is it still possible to use a Win ME boot disk to do it even with NTFS? Did I miss an option that lets you format the ENTIRE disk (not just replace the previous Windows installations) during setup?

Any suggestions most appreciated

 

[prakbrug]

Boot from the Win XP cdrom and follow the instructions. The installation itselfs will ask if you want to format the partition.

 

[Altdotweb]

You can get the boot floppies from www.bootdisk.com It's an EXE that will open to 6 floppies.

Load those and insert your install CD and you can wipe your drive and even partition it with these floppies.

The CD may do the same thing also, but I found that if I had a good copy of XP, booting from the CD would just load XP anyways.