formating a hard drive

Ok i have a machine with windows xp on it. It is really messing up. I want to format the entire hard drive. But for some reason everything is messing up. I have a windows xp boot disk. I wanted to know how you can format the hard drive from the A drive, or if there is a way. I just want to format the stinking hard drive. And o ya i tried sticking in the windows xp cd, but it doesn't boot from the cd, it just trys to boot from the hard drive, which is what i don't want. Formating a hard drive has never been so ahrd

thanks for all the help

 

hey Cc,

what you need to do is set you cdrom drive to boot from first, you can do this in your bios (mostly hit DEL at boot)
then reboot and hit any key when asked for (so it boots from CD) if you don't hit any key, your system will boot from HD.
when you're at the screen to choose for [R] Repair, [ENTER] for setup or [ESC] for exit, hit [R] to go to the recovery console, login to your windows (type pass) and type format c:\


greets