delete partition during bootup?

I have a badly corrupted HD on sis laptop. I messed it up by trying to format using window xp disk and forgot about the recovery disk that my sis had. Now After I try to format with window xp disk, it asked for cd key and I entered an valid one, but it didn't work so I then got the recovery cd she gave me and try to run it. But It errors up half way because it uses norton ghost which was installed then got deleted during window xp thing.

Now I can't run etiher cd and I just need to be able to run a cd that will delete the partition and do a fresh install.

So now I need something where I can burn to a disk and run it during bootup so I can delete the partition and hopefully can do I fresh install. This has been given me alot of stress and I'm ready to throw it out of the window..

Pop in a regular XP CD, one of the first pages you come to it will have an option of deleting the partition. Delete it, make a new one, format it and then you can do whatever. Maybe use the recovery CDs (it will put the same software back on that was on the laptop when it was new).

it won't even load anymore for some reason, it does that system checking then it just shuts off the laptop. But I can load other cd i think because I can still run the recovery cd that won't work and that's why I just want to delete the partition so I can start over.

I had the same problem you are talking about in your second post. You'll have to run a low-level format to your harddrive. You can do this trough a utility from the manufacturer, or I found this quite helpful http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ If your harddrive is from one on the cd, it is a nice cd to have, just in case. A low-level format just writes all zeros to the harddrive. I was able to just use the quick option for my harddrive (seagate) The longer version takes some time so hopefully you will be able to use the quick (it only zeros the first 63 sectors or so.)