Hi

What happense when u go in the bios and low level format, what happense after its finished

Will i be able to boot from my winxp cd (yes its bootable), and install winxp?

Does winxp have the option to create a partition while in the setup?

XP should take care of formatting and partitioning. Don't use the low-level format in your BIOS; you could render your drive unusable.

I've never heard of that before?

How would it do that? Doesn't make any sense to me.

Low-level formatting is not what you think it is. It's the process whereby the raw formatting information is placed on a drive, so parts of the drive can even be found. A high-level format is what an operating system does - that's where the filesystem for that particular operating system is created. Think about it - your BIOS doesn't know how to create a filesystem for Windows XP, Linux, or anything else. It's up to the OS to do that.

Even if you were to successfully low-level format your drive from the BIOS, it still wouldn't make the drive ready for an XP installation. It still needs to be partitioned and formatted, which the XP setup will do.

Whenever I do this, if you are thinking of formatting, try Zeroing your HD so you can be sure you won't be running into any other problems later in the future. Low level formating should take care of WinXP, and even in the WinXP setup process it even asks you if you want to format your HD then install WinXP, I hate this, but whatever you do do not NTFS, when you run into problems, it seems almost close to impossible to go back.