I haven't bought an OEM system since the Pentium days -- I prefer not to be gouged on the price and to have a real choice in the brands of the parts that go into my system, not just the quantity, so I get all my systems custom built now -- but even back then they were pretty much completely scripted. You pop the CD in, it does it's thing, you reboot the system. If there was any choice at all, it was a "Are you ready to begin" sort of choice.
Using a retail CD would allow you to do what you want, and the only other option I can think of is using Partition Magic or friends. Of course there's no guarentee it won't completely hose your filesystem like before.
I have a brand new Laptop, which came preinstalled with Windows XP .. on FAT32.
I have tried to convert to NTFS, using the command:
convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs
the result is disaster.
Now I would like to know, can I format the HD with NTFS, then using the OEM Recovery/restore CD, to install factory software?
Or is it better if I do a clean install using Retail Windows XP pro? ---(I think I can get most of the drivers from the recovery CD).
Or is there another sure and better way of doing it?
Thank You

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