My system will not allow me to reformat my hard drive because it says that the hard drive cannot be dismounted because it is in use. From my reading I understand that it appears to be a partitioning problem. But I don't know how to get around the situation and reformat my hard drive. The system will not run without XP running. I cannot get into the DOS Command window without having XP running in the background. I tried changing the BIOS settings to have the computer start from either the floppy drive or the cd drive and it still automatically starts XP - no matter what the BIOS settings are set to. The system allows me to come in as the Windows Administrator, but again XP is running the show. If it makes any difference this is a Compaq Presario laptop.