I had Vista installed and I didnt like it so I wanted to go back to XP. I wasnt in a dual boot situation so I need to do a format to get rid of everything and start from scratch. I went through the XP set up after booting from CD and I got to the point where it asked me if I wanted to format the current drive.....When I hit yes it said the drive wasnt accessiable and maybe there would be a security setting set up somewhere or whatever. So instead I tried deleting the partition.......that was a mistake because now when I get to the point where it ask me if I want to install on a certain drive there are no drives. All it says is Unknown Drive - Read error.......4 times in the drive selection box.

I tried using fdisk but it wont recognize my hdd size. It is a 160Gb SATA.

Is there another utility I can use to fully format the drive and asign it a drive letter so XP will recognize there is something there to install on?

Hi Bart

Welcome to PC Help Forums

Do you have a floppy drive as you could get Killdisk and eradicate Vista that way?
Then do a brand new install of XP.

Yes I do.........I was hesitant though because the killdisk website says I would need to use fdisk to repartition.......I was under the impression that fdisk doesnt recognize hdds over 64Gb

Re-partition the drive in NTFS using your original XP disk afterwards.

In the box where its supposed to let choose a drive to partition while doing an XP install it says......

Unknown Device
<There is no disk in the drive>

It repeats 4 times in the box......

This is after killdisk.

You can try this little partitioning tool if you like:

GParted -- Welcome

Its a live cd version of the Gnome Partition Editor form some linux distributions. It works similar to partition magic, lets you create, move, resize, ....ect..and format in many different file systems. Its open source, free software, and works great. Just download the iso file for the live cd version, then burn it as an iso image. Most burning software has this option. It then makes a live , bootable cd, and is a handy tool to have. Its fairly small in size also, around 30 mb .

I had to uninstall vista on my computer because it couldnt finish the install,(filles were corrupt)so this boot manager page came up and it said choose an earier verion of windows or system rollback,the roolback never would work,so I did the earlier version and it was like vista totally ruined my copy of windows,it would reboot unexpectidly and mess up alot,I tried deleting boot mgr,from my computer that helped with getting rid of that bootmanager screen and starting,but it was still wack,So I finally had 2 do a fresh install of xp,Luckily I had a copy called the Borg edition,and it is sweet way better than original xp it comes with lots of great programs preinstalled,you can find it on Demonid.com,you got 2 be registered to download from there and you got 2 have a bittorrent client on your comp.I recomend utorrent.