The oracle of bootdisks is at
http://www.bootdisk.com. I was able to bring it up within the last few minutes with and without the www. I don't know what happened when you tried it on the 17th. From the description of the available boot disk for XP that you included several posts back, it sounds as though its not the kind of boot disk that we've had prior to XP/2K in that it just brings in the CD drivers and then goes right into the install where in Windows98se and prior, it did bring in the CD driver and then it went to an A:> command prompt so that we could FDISK, FORMAT, run DOS programs,etc.
I've installed XP several times, like maybe a dozen, but I just allowed the install CD to do it's own thing. I had noticed that it did have the facilities which I've used in the Windows2000 install but have not used them in XP enough to talk about. But I'm glad to hear that the facility on the XP install is that much like 2K.
I'd still recommend FAT32 though. There's been a lot written about the issue of speed with NTFS going all the way from NTFS is a dog to some saying that NTFS is always way faster than FAT32. I don't believe either extreme and haven't been able to do any testing that might sway me. I suspect that the truth is that NTFS does provide a much higher level of security and is sometimes slightly faster than FAT32 and sometimes slightly slower than FAT32, but never enough faster or slower to be able to measure.
And it is true that FDISK that we have now can not work with an NTFS formatted hard disk. That's why you would have to remove all NTFS partitions using the Windows2000 install and the WindowsXP install is apparently capable of doing this.
When FDISK tries to show what is on an NTFS formatted disk, it says there are no partitions. When you try to have FDISK create a partition on an NTFS partitioned disk, FDISK will say there is no available space on that disk!
And the facilities provided in the 2K install are dirt simple and from what JohnWill says and you tried, it's dirt simple in XP also. My only hesitation would be what happens when the 2K/XP install creates the FAT32 partitions with out installing the OS and then a person were to try to install Windows9x, would it have a problem because no partition is designated as "active" though Windows9x no longer needs that designation.
Regards Chris C.