A friend has a 80 GIG HDD in a dell desktop computer, Win XP home installed.
We want to format HDD and install Win XP Prof.
On the HDD is a FAT partition about 30 MB and another FAT partition about 8MB, in the middle is NTFS partition.
Don't want to use recovery disk as we are loading a new OS.
Can't seem to delete the 2 FAT partitions during set-up screen, can delete the NTFS partition and load new OS onto it but when you boot up you get 2 options, Windows Professional and Windows Professional (startup).
Apparently the 2 FAT partitions are for the recovery disk to reinstall back to factory.
Can we wipe HDD clean and install new OS or do we have to do fdisk or something like that?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Cheers
Ken

Of course you can wipe it out clean but remmeber there is no going back(not without recovery) you can do it with some software or with fdisc or whatever you find convinent!!!