Hi, I have been given a laptop and want to put linux on it, but have no experience of formatting hard drives since the world of windows 98.

This is an xp machine with a cd drive only (no floppy) and there is no option to boot it into DOS, only safe mode with command line.

How do I go about formatting this drive, can I do it through the command prompt found in windows? I kind of guessed that you couldn't.

I have Mandrake that I want to put on this and I tried installing over the top, but no joy. I think it should work fine though if I can start a fresh.

Any help would be apreciated.

Frinkbubble