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?