hey guys.
so i bought this laptop for almost a quater of the price of retail.

seems pretty fishy,

he said he didn't know the password, (more fishy)
but i couldn't resist such a deal.

the computer is running vista home premium.

i tried putting in the windows XP cd, to format and install windows, but it's not showing up.

do i need to get a vista OS DVD in order to format it?
and how do i remove or find 'hidden' partitions that contain lojack, or maybe a OEM vista?

What do you mean, "showing up"? As in not showing up on the desktop? Have you tried booting from the disc?

If I were you I'd get a minimalist linux livecd that has drive patitioning tools, and format the drive from that. Should get rid of whatever nasty vistaids is preventing you from installing XP.

By not showing up I'm assuming the CD-ROM is not being read to boot from, therefore you need to change settings in your bios to change the order of what boots up first (sounds like it's booting straight from C: rather than attempting to boot from CD first)

So try that first...

Though if you mean by 'don't know the password', that you don't know the bios password...then oh dear.