formatting hard drive...for the ultimate pc wiz

[Alex]

i have windows XP Pro installed on my pc at present, and i want to format my hard drive, because my pc is being a bugger. i have made an xp boot disk, and when i start my PC with it in, i try 'format c:' command and it says 'bad command name' and when i start my pc in command prompt without the boot disk, i type the same, it then says something along the lines of 'formatting will remove bla bla bla' i type 'y' for yes. it then says it can't because c: is in use. any help would be so brilliant. so, with all this in mind, how do i format my hard drive?

[teststrips]

you probably formated your C: drive with NTFS. Dos cannot recognize NTFS, and therefore does not give it a drive letter. What you'll need to do is delete the partition. You might be able to do that with Fdisk, but some older versions of fdisk will not do this properly. I keep a utility called delpart on my bootable dos disks, which does the job very well. (delpart.exe)

found it here