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?