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The thing is, the XP disc *is* a boot disk. You can use the recovery console to jump to a command line and manually muck around if you want. There isn't a whole lot to learn. Yes, you could format the drive from the command line if you want, but I'm not sure why you would ever want to - I'm not sure it's a skill that'll come in handy. Over the years, Microsoft has made the command line more and more redundant - there's precious little reason to use it, unless you have a very specific reason to (I usually use it for network diagnostics, things like 'ping').
Anyways, the way I and most every other computer geek handles it, is we toss in the XP CD and reinstall, wiping out/preserving partitions as needed. I'm guessing at your skill level from the tone of your post, but I'd suggest you try to simply install XP as a first step. You can try more esoteric things like setting up a RAID if you want to play around more with disks and partitions.
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