Alright, walk me through this. I want to format one hard drive. It is the only hard drive in the case. It has windows XP and I want to reformat the drive. You can not reformat in windows? You have to install the windows installation cd to format. I want the drive striped clean. So I insert the vista cd, praying that it will give me the option to format. It does not and begins to install vista. Step by step, how would you format this disk so that in the end, you have a brand "new" blank hard drive? Thank you so much.

Vista can do a quick format in the advanced options... before you install.

All you need to do is boot from the CD instead of your hard drive, to do this restart your computer with the vista CD (or DVD, I don't know) and set up the DVD drive as first boot device in your BIOS, save and exit, the PC will restart and will ask you to press any key to boot from CD/DVD, do so, the install routine will start, at some point you will be promted to choose a partition to install windows on, choose the want you like, it'll ask you to choose a format for this partition, choose format using NTFS and make sure it does NOT say (quick) or somethin similar, the drive will be totally formated and the nwe OS will be installed, there you go, vista in a clean drive.

PD: Only do this if you have a full vista disc, not an upgrade disc.
PD2: Remember to back up your important data, I know it sounds stupid, but I've personally forgotten to do so and it was a pretty big hassle, remember to double check.

Skittle I found format in the advanced options, problem is, it formated the drive in five seconds. SirCrono, vista gives me the partition but no choice of format.

It's ok to reformat that fast...That's why they call that quick format. I'm not sure but instead of removing everything from the disk block by block that operation only remove the information where the file are store. So, It's really more faster then processing all the disk.

Two hard drives. XP and programs are on the Raptor 150. Perfect. Now the Western Digital 750 (the second drive) had a broken XP operating system and the drive had to be reformated because it had been corrupted and missing files. So I "unpluged" the raptor and inserted the legal Vista OEM into the cd drive. Windows recognized the 750, allowed me, under advanced to choose format. I clicked format and in 10 seconds vista began installing. I wonder if that is where i should have stopped. After that 10 seconds I had what I wanted, a "blank" hard drive.

Now I have vista and only vista on the 750. I do not want vista. I would like a blank 750 to download movies to. When you restart the computer, it doesn't ask which OS you want it to open with. It goes straight to vista, like it or not.

I have Roxio on the Raptor. You normally get a drag to icon on the desktop. I have media players on the Raptor. Vista will not recognize programs on the Raptor. The Raptor shows up under computer and you can view the files. You can't open them.