Camaro69SS299,

Apparently you booted from the Symantec PC Restore partition.  You cannot delete that partition unless you're booting from the Windows XP CD.

Tony

I do not belive the Symantic PC Restore is on my computer...It is about 4 years old...I am booting off of the Operating System Reinstallation CD Microsoft Windows XP professional CD.....I pop in the CD, And restart my computer.When i get to the deleteing the partition portion...I have 1 partition which is named C:Partition1 (Local Disk), and then I have an unpartitioned space 8MB......I press D to delete it...And then a message says  "Setup is unable to perform the requested operation on the selected partition. This partition contains temportary setup files that are requierd to complete the installation."

Im trying to delete the partition so my computer is just like when i got it and i tell it to delete and when i try to delete it then it states the message...My only options when the message comes up is to go back.

the 8mb that you see are temporary files that your computer will load in order for it to be able to perform the task and it will be removed once the formatting and installing process is done. Cheers....

camaro69ss299,

The reason you can't delete the 8MB is that it is unpartitioned space. That step in the installation process only allows you to delete partitions. You will find that if you delete the existing C:\ partition and then attempt to create one large partition from the unpartitioned space that results XP will create a partition the size of the present C:\ partition and leave 8MB of unpartitioned space. This is apparently due to some sort of roundoff error in XP.

Your Dell diagnostics partition, if you still had it, would be an FAT32 partition approximately 30-35MB in size.

You're probably right Denny. The last time I saw a 5-8Mb was on a Win2K PowerVault Server.  Mike Epply at Dell explained to me what it was, but that was about 4 years ago. Sorta like the old man at the retirement home asking his buddy to remind him if it was his buddy or his buddy's brother that passed away last month.

Tony