Why do you think the NTFS is irreversible?  Just repartition and format the hard drive for FAT32 if that is your desire.  As for a BIOS upgrade needed to read a NTFS hard drive, there isn't one as it isn't needed.  It's the operating system that will read the information on the hard drive and not the BIOS.  The purpose of the BIOS is only to detect that "type" of hard drive installed.

 

As for BIOS versions.... with the 4100 model BIOS version A11 is the lastest one and should be used with Windows XP.  Included in that version is support for Windows XP product activation that was originally added in the A10 release.

well I've performed a repair installation as described on page 815 " Windows xp inside out" Now everthing looks fine but I have two user accounts (which is ok) and I've used 2.33 GB of space ( is the operating system in here twice now?......it calls for 1.5 GIG. Anyway,then I read on page 671 (inside out ,second edition) that I should have re-aligned the partition because 512 -byte clusters provide poor performance.( How is a normal person supposed to catch this way in the back of the book) ouch!. Anyway I just left my computer running since I started this thread. What  should I do? Restart and hope I get lucky? I would prefer the ntfs file system I just don't know why It would not boot - Everything seems to have gone fine!

I'm a fairly newbie to Windows XP myself and I basically installed it to play DOOM 3.  I still use Windows 98 as my primary OS so I am not the best one to ask about installation problems with XP.  On my system I installed Windows XP 3 times in order to play around with the FAT32 versus NTFS file systems and finally kept the FAT32 as I like the ability to access the partition from MS-DOS and Windows 98.  Your best bet would be to post in the Software - Windows XP forum and see what other suggestions you receive since the problems are related to the operating system.  You can click here for a direct link to that forum.