Umm. If your loading XP onto it, couldn't you just set your bios to boot from CD first, load in your Win XP cd, boot from that. when you start your install process at the bottom of the screen it will say, to install 3rd party SCSI or RAID drivers press F8 or F6 or something like that. Press that button, (make sure you have the drivers downloaded onto floppy first). After it loads all its stuff it will have an option to allow you to install your drivers from your Floppy. After going through all of this, it should give you the option to delete all partitions, and create a new NTFS Partition.
I don't really know anything about Linux but you could try that.