Hi,
You did not provide much info but i will attempt to help you anyway. I am curious as to what you tried as far as deleting that partition you said you couldn't delete. It MAY be that partition contains system tools needed by the laptop, but i doubt it. Is it at the very beginning or somewhere in the middle or end? In any case, You should be able to boot up the windows xp disk and tell it to do a BRAND NEW installation. then when you get to the part about the partitions tell it you want to do it yourself. Then you should be able to delete ALL the partitions (do not try to make new ones) and then reboot and tell it to do a brand new install again exept this time let windows do EVERYTHING including making/formating the partition. If you are still having difficulties email me humbll@bellsouth.net and give me as much info as possible about the laptop (make, model , year etc, what discs you have (linux AND Windows) so i have some idea what tools you have at your disposal, and also what EXACTLY you have done step by step and what happened at each step. Good luck..