I'm doing a CLEAN XP install. I want to reformat the hard DRIVE (C:) and end up with a single primary partition. Currently, the drive is simple dynamic NTFS; half of which is Unallocated. I tired reformatting from the Windows XP installation CD, but I'm getting an error . . . probably because the drive is currently split up? I think I need to delete the Unpartitioned portion of the drive and then reformat, but I don't know how to delete the Unpartitioned portion. Thoughts?Why is the drive dynamic? Candidly, I'm not sure if there's any difference in deleting a dynamic partition during installation - I don't believe there is. At the beginning of the installation process you should be given the choice to delete and recreate partitions. Delete the extended and logical partitions and create a primary active partitionThe disk is dynamic because I was studying PARTITIONING and RAID a few months ago and this is one of my Guinea pig computers. When I was just trying to reformat, that unallocated portion to the hd showed up without a drive letter. I'll start again and see what comes up.Unallocated simply means unformatted and that's correct, it would not have a drive letter until it's formatted. But it should show up when you try to delete the partition during installation. Thanks, I'll let you know how it turns out...Could not delete the Unallocated space through disk mgmt. Was able to delete, like you said Allan, during installation.

Q: Is there any BENEFIT to running dskchk /r after doing a clean install?The command is chkdsk /r
Did you do a FULL format or a quick format? If you did a full format then chkdsk /r was already run. If not then sure, BOOT to the recovery console and run chkdsk /r - can't hurt.It was a full format. Thanks again.You're welcome