No - the partition was hidden from the disk management utility. Frankly, I never booted from the XP CD in this case, because there was no XP CD for that computer. It was an HP, shipped with a restore partition, and restore disks only. The original system disk had bad sectors, which apparently caused it to fail. I installed a new system disk, restored the system using the restoration disks, and connected the old disk as a slave in order to retrieve such data as the PC owner wanted. Prior to removing the old hard drive and discarding it, I wanted to reformat it for privacy reasons (I also considered using it as a temporary hard drive when needed), and ran into the hidden partition problem. Then, mainly out of curiosity, I became interested in how to get rid of it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
