I was under the impression that fdisk wasn't going to get us anywhere, since he is trying to install Windows XP. I'm assuming it's the lack of a boot disk for XP that makes it so he can't get to a blinking cursor in order to attempt commands... as it stands, there is nowhere to do anything on any of the menus. I read thru all of those links, but from what I understood, fdisk utilities are not used on XP (http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000588.htm). Is there a generic boot disk I can use, that would let him get to a cursor and do a format? I did find this http://www.bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm, but it makes you pay for downloads so I hesitate to do it in case I'm totally wrong here.

I apologize for not understanding this further. Have done many reformats/ reinstalls of OS but never had anything go wrong, so this is confusing to me.

XP is in itself a boot disk. There is no DOS in XP. No blinking cursor until the command prompt within XP.

My idea was to use FDISK just to format. So yes you would need a boot disk. The last link used to have a link to FREE FDISK which was a self contained bootable FDISK app but I can no longer find it.

From Bootdisk.com you can get a free DOS bootdisk as well as any XP machine will create an MS-DOS bootdisk as a format option on a floppy disk. I believe the '98 bootdisk has the FDISK command.

There are also the 6 floppy disks from Microsoft for XP which should access the Recovery Console and Command Prompt: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994

All that being said I am doubting my own idea. Even if you could get there I'm not sure you could format in NTFS which would be not needed but preferable.

Perhaps you should try the clearing CMOS. I have no idea why GParted would graphically implode like that. It is not very graphically intensive.

Another tack is to run Seagates diagnostic on that hard drive:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

SeaTools for DOS


Anyway those are all my thoughts at the moment.

You can use magiciso to burn iso file to cd for creating bootable cd.
http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-burnwin.htm