If I'm following what you're trying to do, perhaps the best place to start
is wiping your drive clean with a utility that will write zeros to your hard
drive.  Typically, the manufacturer of your hard drive will have a utility
that will do this as part of the downloadable diagnostics that you can find
on their web site.  They usually run from a bootable floppy (or floppies).

Once you've done this, you should be able to boot with your WinXP Pro CD and
install from there.  Maybe the only catch will be whether you'll need to
have some drivers for your PCI hard drive controller.  Typically these are
available on a floppy, which you can insert during the installation process,
when it asks you whether something like this is necessary.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Davies" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 2:44 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] formatting c drive


>I am trying to reformat my c drive because it is trash laden and I want to
>load xp pro. XP pro will not work because it is older than the xp I have on
>the system.  I can't reload my Dell system because I added a ipc disk
>controller when mother board's disk controller failed and Dell software
>will not go to new controller. Format won't work because a file is always
>busy.  I don't have a xp floppy so I tried win 98. It will not let me
>format a network drive. How do I get around these problems.

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