im so sorry to bother. and thanx for replying. I have booted my pc with HIREN BOOT CD (whole story on the forum under: XP RESTARTS DURING INSTALLATION) . Hirens boot cd booted fine, now I formatted the C drive so that I can install windows, but when i format (NTFS) and then make drive active, and make it primary drive...Windows setup want me to format and partition my 500GIG harddrive containing all my software, etc to put the startup files on! How can I get it to just put the startup files on a C Partition instead?