Hard drive reformat question

[nlawalker]

Hello!

I have a 40 gig HD in a Dell PC with only a single NTFS partition, running WinXP. I am getting ready to leave for college and I'm going to wipe it clean. I have an XP Home upgrade CD, and the Windows ME disk that came with the computer. What is the easiest way to reformat the whole thing and get XP running again? I was going to boot from the ME CD and reformat the drive there (into FAT32... or is ME still 16?) and then boot from the XP upgrade and install it. Is there an easier way/will that work?

I'm worried about 1. Will I have problems with the registration-key thing for XP? 2. Any problems going from NTFS back to FAT? 3. I don't need a boot floppy, do I? 4. What is the best way to actually execute the reformat? I figured it was "reformat c:" from the DOS prompt when I booted the ME CD, but what about that old /s switch that I'm not even sure what it does?

Thanks!

Nick

[lil Jimmie]

Boot to the XP cd, run the setup and when you get to the portion of the setup where it detects previously installs, delete the partition then partition as you wish and format with either NTFS or FAT32. You will gat a prompt to insert you ME disk to prove that you are eligible for the XP upgrade.

[nlawalker]

Good lord, THANK YOU! I wanted to avoid installing all of ME if I could. THANKS!

Nick