Everytime i try to do this i mess something up and end up just installing Windows over top of a previous install. I want to do a low level format and wipe EVERYTHING off my system and start fresh.

This computer has two drives...a 30GB and a 120GB. Because of some past issues i am currently running windows from the 120 and have it set as my master drive and the 30 as the slave. The 30 is kinda messed and has two partitions with an install on each partition (mostly because i wasn't 100% sure of what i was doing). If i had to i could just scrap the 30 but i don't really want to toss a perfectly good drive.

So what i'd like to do is remove the partitions from the 30 and install windows on there, and have it as my master and wipe the 120 and have it as my slave. Can someone point me in the direction of a step by step guide or something? Thanks

If you want to be sure, you could just get a gentoo livecd and use fdisk to wipe it... There are plenty of windows programs to format disks and whatnot, but I haven't used too many of them.

I have used Norton Partition Magic, and I'd presume all partitioning programs work somewhat the same... If you've currently got Windows on the 120gig, you can install the partitioning program on that and wipe the 30gig... Then you can set the 30gig as master and install windows on it, and then redo your 120gig. I haven't used the windows install for a couple of years, so I don't recall if it comes built in with a partitioning program...

Windows does come with a partitioning program, that's how i initially set it up. But for some reason it wouldn't allow me to remove the partitions . I've tried using fdisk before but couldn't get it to work, but then again that was probably my fault. I'll give that a whirl again. Is there a place where i can download it?