You format it the same way you format any other drive. Boot from the XP CD and it'll give you the option of deleting and creating
new partitions during setup, no need to worry about booting to DOS.

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"Miss Jo Anne CD" wrote in message ...
Hello..I have a friend who has a Compaq Presario 1681 someone gave him and he
wishes to format it and do a clean install of Windows XP onto it...How would
one format the hard drive of this particular computer and how does one start it
in MS-DOS mode?..Thank you ever so much