Deletion of existing hard drive files?

[Jeff]

Can anyone tell me the correct way to erase all files on
a hard drive? I have a school computer and the people who
assembled it dedicated all 40GB to one drive letter (C:)
thus can't have multiple operating systems or multiple
drives. I have both XP Home Edition & Professional. My
problem is a have tried to reinstall but it always
installs on top of the 30GB or so that are already used.
I want to start over with this hard drive clean. Is there
anyway to accomplish my task? I have all A+/Net+
microsoft books from school for reference, it seems
regular DOS commands do not aply to XP. Thank you for
your help, J

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Jeff,

How you proceed depends upon what you want to achieve. You can use the old
dos fdisk to repartition the drive (in FAT32) or use WinXP's disk manager to
install to only a selected portion of the drive. If you could give a clue as
to what your end goal is, then perhaps we can find a way to get you there.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x - http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone -
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Win98 Help - www.rickrogers.org

"Jeff" > wrote in message
...
> Can anyone tell me the correct way to erase all files on
> a hard drive? I have a school computer and the people who
> assembled it dedicated all 40GB to one drive letter (C:)
> thus can't have multiple operating systems or multiple
> drives. I have both XP Home Edition & Professional. My
> problem is a have tried to reinstall but it always
> installs on top of the 30GB or so that are already used.
> I want to start over with this hard drive clean. Is there
> anyway to accomplish my task? I have all A+/Net+
> microsoft books from school for reference, it seems
> regular DOS commands do not aply to XP. Thank you for
> your help, J