Cant format hard drive

[The_Judge]

Im trying to format my Dell XPS laptop and it wont let me format the hard drive. The drive is sepeated into two partitions, one with windows and all my old programs n files on, and the second now has windows on aswell. I cant format the c drive with all my old stuff on and i cant even delete the partition when using the windows xp installation cd.

I just want one big drive, how can i delete the partitions? windows wont let me

 

[bobbydigital]

May sound like a stupid question but are you booting up like normal via cdrom rather than running the installer via windows? Never seen any problems deleting partition via the windows installer.

Try getting some sort of boot disk with partitioning software like acronis and do it before even trying to install windows.

Or remove the drive and hook it up to another pc. Either way at least give it a low level format, oh which could also be done using the hdd manufacturers harddisk health check software.

 

[The_Judge]

sorted, installed vista to demolish it