Formatting HD + Installing Windows help

[haxxorpoop]

I just built my new PC, but my Windows installation has gone anything but smoothly, and I'm at a loss for what to do next.

On the first install attempt, everything went through fine, except my primary drive was showing up as D:/ for some reason (I think it's because I accedentially told the installer to format my secondary hard drive first), so I decided to reinstall. After the reinstall, it was still showing up as D:/, so now I've unplugged all my secondary hard drives and have only my primary drive plugged in.

After installing Windows for a third time hoping it would self-correct to C:/, it still has not. Since there's nothing important on the drive, I want to do a clean format and rebuild the partition from scratch, except I haven't found a way to do it yet. The XP disc tells me it can't format the drive since "The following partition contains information for the install and can not be formatted". I obviously can't format directly from Windows. I have no floppy drive to boot into MS-DOS and format there. The recovery console on the XP disc seems to have no format command. And lastly, the hard drive in question is a SATA2 drive, and I have no older computers that I can plug it into and format from there...

HELP?

[Steve R Jones]

The XP install will let you "Delete" partition(s). Then it will prompt you to create a new one(s).

[haxxorpoop]

That's the thing: it won't let me delete one since it "has files critical to the installation". I think it might have something to do with the fact that Windows is already installed on the drive (maybe it needs to use some files, or the CD stored some temp files there), but that's the problem I'm trying to get rid of...>_>

Yeah...I dont know. I've never had this happen before, and I've probably done hundreds of XP installs...

[roafamily]

you can delete the drive or press enter to create a partition then delete it

have you tried running the recovery console? you can go there and delete it from the command line