XP on Inspiron 1420

I know there's a thread for this but I have a quick question. I know that with vista it installs on partition 2 and theres a hidden partition 1 with some stuff on it I guess. Is it enough to pop in the xp cd and just delete both partitions and then format so I can install XP or will that not work and I need to wipe with dban or something?

This is what confused me, a post from sonicfrequency, who's not online currently:
"And when you reinstall just xp, windows itself doesnt even see the hidden partition. Vista though is a different story. Put in your vista reformat disc and get into the gui for reformatting, click advanced. Dont format or anything, but just looking at your partitions, they start at partition 2. Not a big deal, but when I reformatted I wanted my partitions closest to the hard drive spindle, since Im only running a 5400rpm drive, I want to pinch as much speed out as I could. Less rotations = faster access times.."

 

I covered this in a post a few minutes ago:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2328044&postcount=89

You basically delete the partition table by zeroing the first 512 bytes of your drive. Then you are free to do whatever you want with the drive, as XP (and Vista and any other operating system) will see no partitions and you can create ones from scratch.

So use dban or whatever tool you like. Even a simple command off a linux bootcd like this will do the trick:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

(Warning to anyone skimming this post: your partitions will be lost if you type this)

 

Too late haha, I ended up just popping in my XP cd, and deleteing both partitions (the vista one and the 71mb one) and then formatted and installed XP