How do I reformat my hard drive?

I have never asked this question in years. WIndows XP was always a craps shoot of results when doing this job on various computers and now I'm at the end of my rope and want to know once and for all.

How does one get Windows XP out of their hard drive so they can reformat/repartition the drive.

All the articles with the simple plan deal with upgrades. (WinXP isn't in my add/remove prgrams list.)

Command prompts won't work. (Telling me that the registry doesn't have the files it needs.)

I can't reformat the drive from "My Computer". (Tells me more lame excuses.)

So here I am. Go ahead. Laugh. I'm tuff. How do you do this on my new machine, my old machine, and every machine I ever run across from here on out. Let's hear it.

How do I clean off my hard drive and do a new install of XP?

I did find an article about this and I'm playing with it now.

But when you're done laughing, I still want to hear what you have to say.

if you boot up with the xp cd before the install you can del the partition and create/format a new partition.

Now I'm laughing. That's what I'm doing now.
I guess this means that things have been so stable for the last few years that I forgot to try that.

Never did it on a home build, only my friend/neighbors/freeloaders factory models with a key for "boot from CD".

I'm going to link the article I found so that somebody might be able to search this subject.