Nonsense, encryption doesn't make something hard to format. Since you're gonna lose all the data anyway, you might as well delete then recreate the partition, and format/initialize the new one. The installation can take care of all that for you, so it remains just as easy.

It'd be hard if you wanted to recover all your data first though, of course, but that'll be your fault for encrypting everything and not keeping a recovery disk of some sort to recover such data if you needed to reformat - normal unencrypted NTFS can even be read by linux all fine In this particular case though, even though his system might possibly be encrypted, Windows is still running so he can burn it all to CD as per normal then format.