My 'C' partition will not format

Congrats on 1,000,000 posts....I will help get to the 2nd. million!! After messing up my partitions by not giving myself enough room on the 'C' partition for Xp Pro and the other stuff that got added to 'C', I decided to just start over with another clean install. I put in the OEM Xp Pro CD and worked over to the partition part where I intended to format the entire Hdd and start over with a 20 GB partition for Xp Pro and all of the security stuff...Zonealarm..eTrust Anti-Virus..AdAware, etc..I was gonna partition the remaining 60 Gigs into a couple of partitions for other stuff. BUT...for some reason my 'C' partition could not be formatted ...it said something like there was stuff on the partition that wouldn't let it format it ( no viruses or anything thing like that...just something to do with the programs that were currently there ??) I thought that that was what a clean install was supposed to take care of ...formatting...clean sweep...??? Anyway...I had to set up another partition 'D' of 20 GB and install Xp Pro there...leaving the 'C' partition with about 1.97 GB of stuff that refuses to go away!!! This is a rather minor inconvenience because everything is running just fine, but now my system thinks that I have two o/s's installed...Xp Pro on 'C..and Xp Pro on 'D'..and a window appears upon boot that will ask me which o/s I want to use...as though I have a dual boot system. I have tried to use the format option under properties for 'C' drive but it won't let me format.I don't have Partition Magic, but do you think that PM can get rid of whatever is on 'C' ?

Unless there's stuff that you need to get off the drive, I'd recommend just wiping the drive and starting over. It'll take less to to wipe it than it will to find out what the problem is and fix it.

If you want to zero the drive, go here and download either the floppy or CD image, then put it on a disc. It's a great little utility but be careful, it will detect all hard drives in your system, so make absolutely sure that you pick the right drive to wipe.

If applicable,
Delete the partition in question first prior to format attempt.

David...I don't want to zero the entire hdd...just my 'C' partition...which I am unable to do at this time. Xp Pro is not set up to delete and format partitions once stuff has been installed...you can expand into un-used space...but can't format a partition once it's been set up and had stuff put there ( I think I'm correct on this...please correct me if this wrong...I'm still learning ..) My original question is still this: When I used the cd to do a clean re-install, why did it NOT format my 'C' partition...which held the o/s....was there just a glitch in the process?