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How to format C on a laptop without a CD

There's a box of laptops (all XP) that are going to charity. BUT all need to be wiped completely before being sent out.

Whats the best way to do so....there is no CDs with any of the laptops or a floppy drive on them.

mandude0

To the best of my knowledge, XP will not allow you to format the system drive within Windows. You would need some for of removable device or command.com and format.com on a seporate drive or partition. Even then you would need to boot to to a different drive/partition so that the XP installed is not running.

Another option would be to find an adaptor that will let you connect the laptop HDDs to a desktop/server and format them as slave drives individually. They do make USB to IDE adaptors that support desktop and laptop drives. You can find those for around $20 US and up.

LFC1980

ASKER

whats about some sort of software i could burn onto CD and then boot into it on each laptop ?

mandude0

If you are able to boot from a CD on all of the laptops, you should be able to use any windows OS CD to format the drives. You may be able to build a bottable CD that runs a batch file and automatically fdisks and formats the drives but I am not very well versed in building complex .bat files.

From your original post, I had the impression that booting from CD or floppy was not an option.

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Steve Agnew

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jculkincys

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dplatch

I have used and did all solutions offered to me, and I had no success. The question was " why does my laptop go off and on the internet"? I have a Gateway M350 laptop with built in wireless.