KavazovAngel: ^ is there a section in the BIOS where the connected hard disks are listed?

Namur: Yes, it only lists the IDE and it only has the option to disable it.

Aliasalpha: Well if you can get into safe mode with networking, you can map a network share on another computer, dump the install files into it and then run the setup from that folder, if you're within windowws (even safe mode) it should run nice and easy and give you the option of a clean install. You'd have to select a new install but NOT format the hard drive or you'll lose the XP files, the problem is that you'll likely end up with some junk data left in program files and other places.

What would be ideal is making a 700mb partition on your drive for the XP CD data so you could then format the primary partition and start completely clean but shrinking partitions isn't something xp can do and its pretty likely that you've not got enough unpartitioned space. If you could boot from CD you could use gparted in a ubuntu live cd but if you could boot from CD you'd not have the problem...

The PXE boot would be the cleanest method but its also the most complicated. Your system should be able to handle PXE, its not much different from DHCP in concept, the NIC sends out a broadcast asking if there's a boot server and if there is it can pull data from it

Ooh I just noticed the USB floppy option, I've seen bootable USBs configured as floppies, I'll see if I can find the relevant info

Okay, this link has info on making thumbdrives bootable and emulating a floppy which should hopefully let it boot your machine. I think your best bet there would be to get a thumbdrive thats about 2gb and make a pair of partitions on it, use the floppy on the first partition and dump the XP install cd on the next (in dos you need to go into the i386 folder and run winnt.exe). Scratch that, your best bet is to try the floppy thing by itself first to see if it works before wasting the time partitioning and copying

KavazovAngel: Connect a USB device, restart the machine, go to that section again and see if its listed there. :)

Aliasalpha: If you can enable both network boot options, it likely wouldn't hurt, it'd just be a race to see which works first.

There's a chance that one of them might be a wireless NIC but I don't think I've ever seen those with boot options

Stuff: I would create a small 5 to 10 GB partition on the drive assigning a drive letter, copy the install CD to that partition over a network or from a USB drive. Boot to the command prompt using F8, navigate to the winsetup.exe on the new partition / drive and run the setup for my existing C drive with a full format of C. You could delete the install partition later . . . or not. Forgive me if there is an obvious flaw in my logic . . . it has been a long day . . . =)

Edit: Depending on how new the computer is . . . you may need to make a slipstream disk with the MB drivers on it. My last few installs of XP needed a slipstream disks. My "new" computer didn't have an A: drive and XP didn't have the drivers for the MB since it didn't exist at the time. Naturally, the install wouldn't recognize a USB or let me switch to an alternate drive so . . . slipstream . . . =)

I like this program for slipstream disk but others like nlite

Edit 2: Hehe . . . I was assuming you could still boot to Windows