hey guys, i'm glad to say i'm typing this message from the computer i was repairing last night. what i did was hook it up to another hard drive and make it a slave to that hard drive, and then went to "My Computer" and right clicked on my hard drive and formatted it. then i came and installed winME, and then proceeded to install winxp, pro..... and i knew that i had an option to , here it comes, PARTITIONNNNN.... so when it restarted i formated the extended dos partition and placed winxp on that. thanks guys.