Formatting Hard Drive

it sounds like you are trying to format the HD while you are still in windows xp.  Did you boot your computer and then try to format the HD by right clicking on the drive letter or type in format in the command window?  If so, it will not work.  You will need to put your windows xp disc in the disc drive, reboot your computer, but boot to cd drive.  When you reboot, the first screen is the bios flash screen, you will see press F2 at the bottom, so press F2.  You will get into your bios setup, go to boot tab and change the boot device order to put the cdrom as your first choice, go to exit, select save settings and exit, press enter, the computer will reboot.  It will boot from your cdrom, which you have windows xp disc in.  Then from there follow the wizards.  if you want detailed instruction, go to internet search engine and type in "clean install windows xp".  You can also go to microsoft web site and type that in (you will get the link if you type it in an internet search as well).  This will give you an idea of what to expect before you actually do it.

You can not reformat the drive under Windows. Get a W98 Boot Disk(DOS really), use it to boot into DOS/ Fdisk and delete the NTFS/NonDOS Partitions. When you finish, you should show No Partitions Defined. Then put your W-XP CD in the CD drive, remove the W98 Boot Disk and reboot, strike key when prompted to boot from the CD. You will be asked during Setup to remake Partitions and Format, and then W-XP will be installed.