hard drive wont format

hey, I'm having problems reloading windows xp, originaly my problem was that when I started my computer after it went through bios it would just give me a black screen and then I formated it cause I thought the bootini was messed up but everytime it went to "inspecting your system's hard ware" it would just go to a black screen again, anyways I had a guy at work that has a side computer repair bussness look at it and he put put an incomplete version of windows 98 on there for doing diagnostics on it or something and formatted it with fat32, to make a long story short we ended up finding out that something was wrong with my processor (1.6 ghz pentium 4) so i replaced it and got a new motherboard and amd prossesor asus a7n8x-e deluxe, with amd 2700, well now when I try to load xp it says "cannot find end user's liscence agreement (eula) setup cannot continue" so i googled that, found out that its because of being formatted with fat32 thats causeing it, so I tried to format it with the xp repair fuction and it says it cant find the autofmt.exe, did a dir and the only info on C: is a io.sys and command.com and some other dinky files, i tried to specify io.sys and it says that the C: drive cannot be formatted, I'm a noob that knows how to google and I'm out of options please help me or is it time for a new hd?

 

ah, ment to add, when the computer starts up after bios load it gives me 2 options load 98 or windows xp update/install if i choose 98 it only gives me a dos prompt which it what i thing the guy at work had loaded or something, when I do a dir of C: this is what I get....

io.sys
msdos.sys
command.com
bootlog.prv
bootlog.txt
inf000.swp
inf001.swp
$win_nt$.~BT
Bootsect.dos
boot.ini
txtsetup.sif
$LDR$
NTdetect.com
NTLDR
$win_nt$,~LS

 

Instead of formatting with the repair function, format with a new install. If you are still having the option of Win 98 or XP, the Hard drive was never properly formatted before you installed XP.

Instead of selecting Repair, go with a new install, and see if that helps. It should ask you to delete partitions, and then create them again, and at that point you can format, and install.

Hope this helps.

Eric