I've found that reformatting Using the XP disk (and in the past Win2k)
still retains some minor irritants, and not all information is removed!
Chances are bad installs (especially hardware) will recur, causing you to
stress even more.
If you want to reformat, obtain the name of your hard drives, eg Seagate,
Western Digital....go to their sites and find disk utilities.
There are some that check your disk physically for errors, so at least you
can eliminate that issue from the install.
There is also a very nifty tool that writes your hard drive with zeros,
called "Zero Filling". This wipes ALL data from the disk,viruses,
partitions, hidden files, MBR, MFT, product activation, THE LOT but leaves
the important geometry information intact, so the disk still works.
It's important to get the right manufacturer for your hard disk, so if you
have a Seagate, get Seagate utility!!
After you have zero filled, (takes a few hours for 60GB+ HDD), check your
BIOS to boot from a CD-ROM and install your XP CD-ROM and you can format
from there. Try for the OS Boot disl to be around 12-17GB, that way you can
setup the rest of your drive's space later in Disk Management, rather than
wait for the whole disk to be formatted NTFS.....although drinking a few
pints of ale while that happens is not such a a bad idea....
