heres your answer
WARNING: CHANGES YOUR HARD DRIVE TO NTFS FROM FAT32. IF YOU ARE GOING HAVE MULTI-BOOTS (OR JUST OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS ON YOUR COMPUTER WITH XP), DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS AS CHANGING YOUR HARD DRIVE TO NTFS IS ONLY COMPATABLE WITH XP. TO READ ABOUT IT MORE, VISIT THE MS WEBSITE.
these instructions are good for computers with NO cd-rom support in dos, NO cd-rom support even after enabling your BIOS to boot from the cd-rom, and only 1 hard drive, as is the case with my computer
1. on the MS website go to the knowledge base and look up "bootdisk". it gives you a website where you can download a 4mb program that creates a 6 floppy disk "windows XP install with cd-rom support from bootup" start up set. Make sure you get the program that is specific for XP Home or XP Pro, as they are different (why this program is not more readily available is totally beyond me, as this, THIS an XP install/reinstall GOD and should be had by absolutely everyone).
2. shut down your computer, pop in the 1st floppy, and go to town. You will end up loading all 6 floppys before the program begins. after it will tell you to put in your XP cd and the partitioning/reformatting will begin.
3. unlike just popping in your XP cd WHILE in windows and telling it to install, when you boot up with these magic floppys, it gives you the ability to do a full partition-delete and partition-recreate (this is impossible WHILE in windows because it says "this hard drive cannot be reformatted because it has necessary XP system information" ... some bull$hite like that). delete your partition you have now, and then create a new partition. make sure and use all the available HD space (or you can make up to 4 of them per hard drive, according to the MS knowledge base).
4. it will tell you its time to format your computer. you do not have a choice of fat32 or NTFS, but rather a choice of NTFS (quick) or NTFS (full). I did the full and it took an hour to format the hard drive (60GB).
5. after that XP will start installing like normal.
6. when you are done (about another hour later), get into XP and defrag.
7. after defraging, reinstall all of your drivers, music, or whatever you want. you will never really know what drivers will work until you are totally done with this install. my sound and webcam did not work after this, even though they had worked on XP before (in FAT32). i had to download a 20MB webcam driver and a 20MB sound card driver (with 28.8 it took 6 HOURS, glad i did it during the middle of the night while i was sleeping... hahaha) and now my system is totally functional/totally clean/ and totally fassssst.
