need help with format

[JordoCB]

Hello everyone. I've been fiddling with this thing for a little over an hour and haven't had any luck so I though i'd ask some people who actually know what they're doing.

I'm trying to do a format on my hard drive, and then i'm going to do a fresh install of Windows XP.

I put in my XP CD, ran the setup. Selected New Install. etc etc. then it reboot and then ran the setup again. I asks me which partition I want to install the new OS on. It shows me two partitions -- Partition1 - FAT filesystem of about 30 mb.. don't really know what that is.. do i need it? and another partition ( my C: ) . I had planned on just deleting that partition and then doing a new partition with the unpartitioned space then install my new OS on that. When i go to delete my partition with my C: on it, it gives me "Setup is unable to perfom the request operation on the select partition. The Partition contains temp. setup files required to complete the installation."

Any ideas on what I can do to get around this? Or any other ways to format my hard drive, get rid of everything, then do a fresh install of XP?

Any help is much appreciated, sorry for the long post.
(Hope i have this is the right forum :( )

Thanks

--Jordo

[reboot]

Get a good boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and run fdisk. Make partitions the way you want them, FAT32 (for now).
Insert the CD, and boot to it, and install XP wherever you want.

[JordoCB]

Okay Thanks, I'll give it a try.

But wouldn't I want to do NTFS fs? I thought it was more secure than FAT32. But , I don't know that much so lol.

Thanks again.

--Jordo

[trulad]

Follow Reboot's instructions and when you install XP you can choose NTFS at that time. Yes, NTFS is much better.
Trudy

[reboot]

You will be prompted to change to NTFS during the install. It's not necessary, and the NTFS security you're talking about is only for local, hands-on, stuff. It has nothing to do with internet security.

[JordoCB]

Kewl Kewl, i figured that it'd let me have the option to convert to NFTS when I was installing. Got everything up and running fine now. Thanks for the help guys. :) Appreciate it.

--Jordo