ok so it turns out im an idiot im trying to format a friends primary hard drive they are using XP and ive never formated anything in xp before so any help would be appriciated
If your looking to format the drive xp is installd on and install a clean copy of xp, then during the xp install you can format the drive using quick ntfs format. If your formating a new drive using XP then.... Right click My Computer icon > manage > storage > disk management. XP should detect the new drive and ask if you wish to format it, of which you follow the on screen intructions, if it does not ask, then right click the new drive and select format, again then follow on screen instructions. Otherwise grab a boot cd, something like Ultimate boot cd of which has a selection of tools to format the drive with.
So your friends pc has more than one drive right? and the main drive that he wants to put xp on already has a copy of it right? In that case put the xp cd in the drive, make sure that the pc boots from the cd. When it starts up there will be options to either fix the current xp, reinstall, some other options (its been a while i cant remember exactly). just take a look and i'm sure that you will understand, its mostly written in plain english. The option to format the drive will come up. Just make sure to format the correct one. If I was never sure I would just unplug the other drive in the system so that i didn't select it by accident.
Thats fine for when your in DOS, of which your likely need a boot disk/cd to get there... also if I recall format.com does not support NTFS format.
More info is really need to answer this question completely, but like Delphium you can format the drive within windows setup.