Re-formatting a Toshiba laptop

[Dan]

An 'old friend' (Age, not the time I have known him!!  ;D ) is wanting me to re-format his Toshiba laptop. Its about 2 years old, runs XP Home and he does know what it entails. So - Is there anything I should know? And if he doesn't have a restore disk, just the XP Home disk, hows best for me to start the format? We have agreed on NTFS. Any help / wise words?
Dan

[the_autopilot]

Boot using the cd, partition, install.

Do not use the XP installer from windows. Put the XP disc in cd-rom. Shut down computer. Turn back on. Boot from cd.

Then partition, the XP setup is pretty straight forward.