Originally Posted by scroggs
But can I format the bloody thing? I probably can, but I haven't worked out how....
I had that a while ago. I used the old-fashioned method: a boot floppy with FDISK on it. I can't remember what Win version it was - probably doesn't matter.
Once I'd deleted the existing partition, I set the machine to boot first from CDROM (Press F1 or whatever at boot-up) and installed from a Linux CD.
I told it to configure for multiple boot, using GRUB. There are now 3 hard drives in there, and nine partitions with various stuff on them. Default boot is Fedora Core 5, but there are several other Linuxes. It's a 600MHz Pentium, and runs about as fast in Fedora as the main desktop running XP - that's a 3.2GHz. Such is the Windows "overhead".