Yes. And yes.

eta: Also tried burning a blank CD.

eta²: On my iBook, I can eject a CD by holding the F12 key down for a second or two. Which is cool, as there's now no CD icon on the desktop to drag to the trash.

Yeah, your drive is frelled.

It sounds like Miriam's mousepad is frelled, too. Hi, Miriam!

If ya wanna totally wipe out an XP installation and reinstall, what do you do? (We suspect a virus, so we wanna kill the boot sector too.)

If ya look here [link] they say you can just boot from the XP install disk and wipe out the previous partition before the install:

Because an existing Windows XP installation is detected, you will be presented with a screen asking if you wish to repair it. Press to bypass the process (do not repair).

Wiping your Hard Drives clean

The next screen you are presented with is where most people have difficulty. You will be presented with a screen offering some choices of action, and a list of existing hard drive partitions which also indicate existing Windows installations. My suggestion for the best course of action is this:

* Remove existing partitions
* Create new NTFS partitions
* Install Windows XP on the first partition of your Primary hard drive

Highlight the first partition, press <D> to indicate you wish to delete it, and follow the prompts to remove the partition. Continue the process for other partitions. When you've finished removing the partitions, and are left with a list indicating the drives and the ‘Unpartitioned space' they contain, highlight your primary drive and press <C> to indicate you wish to create a new partition. Type the size (in Megabytes) you wish the partition to be, or press <ENTER> to create a partition using all available space on the drive. Repeat the process until you've created all the partitions you wish to have.

Does this wipe out the boot sector? Should I use fdisk?

eta: I think I'm gonna use zap: [link]

Tommy, before you blank the thing, you might want to think about backing up your Windows activation files. It might save you some hassle later when you have to reactivate your installation. [link]

Thanks!

You can redo the boot sector with fdisk /mbr. (As long as you don't need a driver to see the boot volume).

Will that work with fdisk, if fdisk doesn't know what a NTFS partition is?

The Zap guy sez:

ZAP writes the first 128 logical blocks of the drive with 00h pattern, starting at Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1.
This will very quickly wipe the FAT and boot sector, often necessary since Dos's Fdisk struggles 'seeing' non-dos partition types

I've done it to wipe LILO off an XP drive and didn't have any problems.

You can also use the recover console on XP and do "fixmbr [Device]" ie. fixmbr /Device/HardDisk0

OK, I'll give ol' fdisk a try first.

(fdisk makes me all sentimental....)

Tommy, before you blank the thing, you might want to think about backing up your Windows activation files.

This is a great link. Thanks DX!