How do I reformat IBM ThinkPad T completely?

[eynlai]

I just bought a second hand IBM ThinkPad T series from ebay. It seems to work fine and all the specs seems to be as claimed, except for one thing. Windows XP Home is in Chinese! The seller didn't make mention of it and I didn't even think to ask. I've tried messing around with the settings to change it to english but no luck. I also noticed that the harddrive has a wierd partition, c drive at 5G, d drive at 10G, and e drive at like 12G. I think this is a overseas version because the power plug is not US and has a adaptor on it. Seller was nice enough to include it.

I noticed that IBM don't send recovery CDs. But I heard that they put the recovery reboot on one of these partitions? I did the reboot and guess what I got? Chinese!

My question is 2 folds:

#1. How do I do away with the pesky partition?
#2. How can I install like the retail US version of Windows XP that I got from Best Buy?

I guess I'm really looking for a way to effectively wipe out the entire HDD and start from scratch.

Please help, and please keep in mind that I'm not very tech-savvy.

Thanks.

emmie

 

[Nodsu]

Use some disk wiping utility (or a Linux/BSD live CD) to zero the beginning of the hard drive. Let the wiper run up to 1% or use the dd command in unix.

After that you just boot from your Windows XP CD and install.