I erased the C partition, need help to be able to use it?

Question

Ok, I was trying to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop because it was really messed up, so I used the Windows Disk to reinstall it. I rebooted my laptop and booted the CD, so, after going through the legal stuff, I finally got to the part of choosing a partition. I thought I had to erase the partition, so I did and now it says: Non partitioned space (the one that was C NTFS). Now, I tried to make a new partition, but it says it cannot create a new partition in the selected space because the disk if filled with the maximum number of partitions. If I try to installl Windows XP it says the same thing. So... what do I do? Did I mess up the partition forever or what? I cannot do anything, I cannot install Windows and I need to get it working soon, so, is there anything I can do?

Answer 1

u have to clear/ format the partition, and choose how much of the partition u want to use.

Answer 2

delete it again and format it again. After format you must reinstall windows.

Answer 3

after you create a partition you should format it.

Answer 4

Stop if you need anything off your hard drive.  You will need to remove the drive and install it into another PC and use a partition recovery program to get access to your files.

If you don't need anything off the drive then do what you already have done but remove ALL the partitions that are listed.  It sounds like the recovery partition or something like go back was installed and is interfering with the install.  Dell is notorious for having a small partition with recovery software that screws with XP installs.  

Answer 5

nothing is messed forever. follow the instructions on the screen, they could be tricky because they require you to press irrelevant buttons to create/delete partitions.

insert you cd again and follow everything step by step and make a new partition are re-formating.