help with formatting a hard drive please

i have a very old a pentuim 3 computer with a 30gb hard drive and running xp that im trying to fix up for a friend . im having difficulties formatting the hard drive because i want to install a new copy of win xp and start from fresh . ive managed to get into dos by making a boot disc on my own home computer but once in dos im stuck for how to format the drive any help with this would be much appreciated . ive tried to use the command format c: and this is coming up asa bad command

 

How do you mean boot into the CD? From DOS?

If so can you confirm how this is done. I'm pretty rubish when it comes to DOS so excuse my stupid questions!

Cheers.

 

The problem is I cant get bios up because I've tried every key conbo to get it up and it won't work. I've also done a floppy boot up disc (6 disks) which works ok untill when it requests for the xp cd to be entered and then it doesn't seem to like the fact that xp is already on the computer.

I think I really need to wipe the HD from DOS and then start fresh with the boot up disks and so on for it all to work.

What other ways are there to get into DOS with out using a DOS start up disk?

 

I've finaly got it to work with the bootup disks (unless it buggers up!!)

I think it's just a old machine and it's a bit unstable to be honest.

Thanks alot for your help though mate.

David.