acer vista help

i have an acer aspire ast180-ua381b desktop with vista home basic
i messed up when i formated the drive and i would like to reformat and take out the partition i mistakenly placed at about half the drive space.
the drive is 160 gb.
drive c: is 69.7 and d: is 69.5
using the shrink partition only will let me shrink it to 1333 for c and i would rather just reformat the whole drive and start all over.
if i take out the drive and reformat it and put it back in will it reboot and start all over setting up vista???
i have 3 gb of ram
i have some registry errors that i can't seem to correct so i would like to start over, i have system mechanic and it won't correct them either
can you let me know what i need to do to start out setting it up like new?
how to format the drive ect. i have another computer with xp to format the drive with.
<snipped email address> Please help!!
thanks very much
Ron Ericson