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There are a few ways you can go about reformatting.... I'm most experienced with the DOS method of booting from something other than you HD, for example a bootable floppy, then running fdisk. Deleting the partitions, then running format and letting it do it's thing. In case you don't know the commands they are
A:\fdisk 'where A: is your floppy and
A:\format C:\ ' where A: is still and floppy and C: is the hard drive being formatted.

There might be a problem.. if you have the upgrade version of XP I'm not sure if it's bootable, so it would make re-installation of an OS difficult. If you have the full version, just pop in the CD, make sure that you BIOS is looking for the CD-ROM as whatever it is (ie: secondary master or whatever); you will be prompted to boot from the CD and the installation setup will take it from there.
I hope this helps.
 
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Hello and welcome Sparkles

Try this...:D

Put the XP in the CD-Rom

Change your boot sequence in the bios to boot from CD-Rom first and save to bios.

After it starts to load XP there will be an option to delete the current partition, Do so...

Then follow the instructions.

BTW you will need a CD with a full version of Windows 95, 98 or NT when it asks for verification of an earlier version of Windows.

Without it you are not going to install XP this way...;)

If this fails you will have to write zeros to the hard drive first then try this again.

What brand of drive do you have?...:)
 

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Hmm.

First question before getting rid of your current OS is why wont it let you, does it give you a reason or just an error message. It may have detected that vital hardware is incompatible and the Upgrade to XP will just give you a giant paper weight.

Better check out the compatibility option off of the XP disk and confirm that all the hardware you have is usable. Just to be on the safe side.

Safe is good, if everything is compatible and you dont care about your data thats allready on your drive. Just put the disk in the CDROm and reboot goto the install new option and then format the drive when it gives you the option right in the XP setup.
 
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