[Saintly]

The simple way to clear the drive when you are upgrading / installing Windows XP (Home or Pro) is to boot from the CD, select to install windows (not repair), when it comes up with where do you want to install Windows, highlight your old partition, select delete (and confirm with 'L'), select the new free space, select create, select the newly created partition and select install. All windows XP systems can only format NTFS. I allways select a full format (rather than a quick format) to give the system a chance to look for bad sectors.
Hope that helps.