--dude, she doesn't have a floppy drive\n\nYes you could put it on a bootable CD.\n\ngive us a little more info because I don't want to cause you to do something you don't want.\n\nFormat = ERASE EVERYTHING\n\nSo you want to erase everything on your hard drive?  Do you want to reinstall Windows afterwards?  If you want to reinstall Windows afterwards, you need a real Windows CD, not one of those recovery CDs.\n\nYou could take the hard drive out of the laptop and stick it in a desktop computer and format it from there (though you might need an adapter).  I've done this before.