Well if you dont have anything on the drive that you want to save there then the easiest way is to enter bios and make the CD rom the first boot device. Put in the XP CD in the cd drive. Boot up from the CD choose install. and then in the istallation menu choose either to delete the partition and create a new one or just choose to format the drive. This can only be done if you boot from the CD not if you choos clean install from windows.
 
I have done this procedure like a zillion times and it is no problemo at all..
 

Thanks for that reply, i did what you said and changed the boot device in the bios to cdrom, however when it bootsup it says (disk boot failure. is this due to it being xp home upgrade?
 
cheers....keeny.

sorry my mistake, dam lead was loose on cdrom...............Try again thanks .
keeny

If it is a upgrade only type of CD, it can get tricky...
 
I know from the Win98 uppg. CD that it wanted to see a installed OS somewhere that it could upgrade. What I had to do then was to direct it to itself (ie. When looking for an os to uprade, i chose the CD that i Booted from. Then i chose to install to C: (or what ever) that worked fine)
 
Hope it will with XP aswell...

Hey thanks alot mate, everything went smmmmmmmoooooooooooooth , just got to set a few things up now. Anyway thanks again for the help much appreciated.
Cheers keeny.

Well I'm glad it all worked out fine! Those Installations can get messy if you don't know exactly what you shold do. (Guess thats why I'm doing all the OS installations for my friends )