Technical Difficulties o.O

Long story short: My brother's friend has a computer, a bunch of idiots use it frequently, he wants to get rid of all of the spyware and junk that's ended up on it and the easiest way to nuke everything is by formatting his hard drive and reinstalling Windows..

Problem: He can't format his hard drive, because he gets an error message saying that it can't be formatted because that's where Windows is installed.

Question: I've tried formatting my hard drive on an old computer before and got the same problem, which I never got around to resolving. I'm thinking that creating a new empty partition, installing Windows on it, and setting it as the primary drive might allow us to format the the partition with all of the crap on it. Is that plan crazy enough to work?

I'm lost. Can you give some more info like does he already have 2 separate partitions, are we talking about XP?

Yes, XP, I don't think the computer is quite old enough to have come with anything else. And as far as I know he only has one partition.

Well, correct me if if I'm wrong but I assume you were trying to format the disk directly from windows but that's not possible cause it's a boot partition. All you have to do is restart the comp, boot from XP installation disc and during the installation you will be given the option to format or create partitions. Format the current partition and create a new one.

Hmmm... I suppose that's almost crazy enough to work.
I guess I'll have to ask if he still has the disc next time I see him, and if not I'll just have to burn him a new one~

Hope I helped. Good luck!

A more reliable way to format the disk is to download a Linux live CD, boot from that and format the drive while it isn't mounted. The Windows format utility sometimes likes to do strange things with the flags and sizing in the partition table. If you're only going to install Windows again and aren't likely to bother with partitioning then the Windows utility will do fine, just make sure you format the disk and not just install over the top of the existing Windows installation.

A baseball bat and a phoenix down.

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Originally Posted by Værn

Hmmm... I suppose that's almost crazy enough to work.
I guess I'll have to ask if he still has the disc next time I see him, and if not I'll just have to burn him a new one~

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It's what you were trying to do that's crazy :p. You can't format the partition that you run the OS from within windows, what would happen when you deleted the program that did the deleting? :p