Hello,

I’ve had problems with my Dell Dimension 8300 and want to reinstall the XP Operating System (Home Edition). I tried other solutions such as system restore but have decided that reinstallation is what I want. So I follow the instructions & boot from the CD-ROM drive with the reinstallation CD in. This all goes ok, then after the licensing agreement I get the bit on partitioning and here I have a problem. The information on the screen is as follows,

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114440 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 atapi MBR

-:  Partition1 [FAT]                        47 MB 39 MB free

C: Partition2 [NTFS]                     114393 MB 108563 MB free

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I have backed up all my files and so want to format my drives and make as clean a start as possible. However I don’t know what I do here.

It says Partition1 is too small, so should I delete this, what is it for etc?

Then it says that Partition2 is a System Partition and deleting this might cause problems (lose valuable system information) and this makes me worry. Do I need to delete or can I go straight ahead with installation.

I would be very grateful if somebody could explain some of the above so I might learn and also advise me on the best solution.

Kind Regards,

Eoin