FG pointed you to one way albeit a very long way, in solving this quandry. Though without fail his advice is sound and will work. You should be able to boot the CD, with the SONY drive installed as master, format the drive from the XP installer.

Lynchknot it sounds to me like you chose to repair the current installation. You want to format the drive, so after pressing any key to boot from the CD, you go through the process of letting it load the setup files, pressing F8 at the Eula, deciding to format the drive using either the NTFS or FAT32 partitioning method (i recommend NTFS).

What it sounds like to me with the options you have chosen is that you are trying to repair your current installation, which is impossible.

When you boot from the CD, choose to install XP on a partition, and then choose FORMAT the partition.

I shall point you to a resource that you will find very handy and convenient in this situation:

http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/O...tallxppro1.htm

Hope that helps.