OH I SPOKE TO BLOODY SOON!!!!! so i used the win98 boot disc to fdisk the drive .. wipped it clean .. booted up w/ the xp cd .. then i started to partition the drive with NTFS .. last time i checked the thing was at 68% .. i come back .. BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH with error code STOP 0X0000000A (0XFFFFF990, 0X000000FF, 0X00000001, 0X8080D258) .. sigh ..