I am having problems formatting Vista

[Pilgrim]

Anyone who has ever tried will know the problems but be brave someone 'cause I need help. 

Just tried for about 3 hours to format Vista for someone and hit many problems. I read up on the solutions on the internet and none work. I have lost count of how many PC's I have formatted for people over the years all the way up to and including Windows XP, but I have never known anything like Vista.

I do not have the Vista disc as it was pre-installed on a PC they bought. A work around solution is apparently to drop in an XP disc and wipe the Vista partition at XP install stage...XP loads all its drivers ready for the install but then I get a stop error and the blue screen of death. (Vista Clash?)

I have tried .ISO CD/Floppy Formatting tools but was defeated...So how the hell do I wipe Vista?
My mate bought Vista Home Edition ready to put back on (the current install is beyond repair), but this is only a Vista upgrade and I will be putting XP Pro on first, which brings me to another headache - the Drive it is going on is SATA and I have read that XP and Vista may not be able to auto detect the C: Drive which would leave me with a wiped hard drive and no way of re-installing XP then Vista. I have heard something about a SATA driver that is available to avoid this. How do I get that onto a clean hard-drive and still be able to install? (The DVD drive - the only drive - will have the XP/Vista disc in when I need the driver). Any help would be appreciated! 

For the past 3 hours my mind has had Bill Gates slowly rotating on a spit roast with the pole shoved up his arse...buttock or flabby belly anyone?

[swytch]

@Pilgrim-

I, too, have had this problem in the past.  (It produced quite a bit of cursing!)  Anyhow, you'll need a program along the lines of this: http://www.dban.org/about to first wipe the drive.  Then use the Windows XP (6) boot disks/floppys to get you going.  Then the Windows XP install CD should take over.  For reasons unknown to me... This VISTA beast doesn't recognize an XP boot/install disk.  Like you've mentioned.... this was never an issue in the past with Microsoft OS products.

And yeah.. i still use those old 6x XP boot floppies!!!    

Excellent link for boot disk downloads:  http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Good luck!
P.S.  Sata drives should not be a problem at all.

Swytch~~ 

[Jewels]

Pilgrim is this settled yet?

If you still can't wipe the drive, I've read many good things about gparted, which you can run from a live cd.

If you still need that other file you mentioned, and it appears you don't have a floppy drive, can't you put it on a usb stick?

Worse case scenario is install a linux version on the pc, then install window. It's not the preferred order of installation (usually it's windows first-then linux) but there are many tuts out there that show you how to do the installs in this manner and then how to delete the linux os once windows is up and running. However, I wouldn't actually recommend that, as it's not a bad idea to have an alternative OS present when windows goes wonky. Having Puppy save my data-azz recently, I'm leaning more and more towards having dual boot pcs.