Removing a boot or fixed partition?

Question

My girlfriend has an old HP 751n that got hit with a REALLY bad virus. Tried Norton, AVG, spybot and ad-aware, all with no success. So I was left with reformatting and re-installing XP. However, when I went to do this, it showed two partitions (one large and one about 4GB) on her one hard drive. I wanted to install it on the larger one and format it, but when I selected it, Windows said it could not format the partition. So I installed on the smaller one, figuring I could go in through Control Panel and do it, but Windows still won;t do it saying it is a boot partition.

HELLLLPPPPP

Answer 1

download this and burn it to a cd,put in the cd to bad computer when it comes up type AUTONUKE

problem solved.windows makes a partition that holds the boot junk and wont let windows remove it that is where the worst ones hide

Answer 2

That smaller partition was the system recovery partition that HP put on the machine to allow you to re-install windows.

It sounds like you booted from an XP CD...  Boot from the CD again, watch the install and it will give you the option to delete partitions.  Delete BOTH partitions, then tell it to install in the "un-partitioned space"  It will re-create a single partition and should install fine for you.