Partitioned Drive Format Problem

I tried to format my C drive to reinstall Windows XP last night and while it was telling me that drive C was being formatted, it actually formatted drive D. I tried this several times and am unable to format drive C. It is an 80 gig drive devided into four partitions and the D partition is the only one that has been affected. Does anyone have any idea as to what is going on? Any help would be appreciated.

 

I don't know how you're trying to format it. But the way you should do it is put the windows XP CD into the drive, boot and then format the C partition while installing windows.

You won't actually be able to format the windows partition while in windows. Since it would be in use, and if you use a boot disc to do it from a command line that wouldn't work much better since you'd only be able to format as fat32 and it's better to use NTFS. Plus when installing an OS it's best to do it while installing, if you really want you can format it as fat32 during the install processes as well.