I need to format the hard drive on several computer without installing another os on them, but I can't quite seem to do so...
the OS on them is 2000 or NT4, and they don't have cdroms.

can anyone help me out.

 

boot to a floppy disk. you can make a bootable floppy by formatting a disk (from the command line) and adding the /s switch. i.e. "format a: /s" without the quotes. then just stick format.com (i think it's .com) on the floppy and format it. or get partition magic from kazaa.

 

not really

 

What exactly are you trying to do? Do you need to destroy the existing data on the disks for security purposes? Or do you need to delete NTFS partitions, or something else?

 

we're selling a bunch of our old computers and so yeah, I need to destroy the data for security purposes. I can go through the 4 win2000 boot disks and the go into the repair module and do it that way, it just takes a long time and I was trying to think of something quicker.

 

I might add that they aren't normal ide hd's either or I'd just take them out and add them on an existing comp and format them..

 

What kind of drives are they?

What you want to do is overwrite the entire contents of the disk. Just formatting will not completely destroy the data, and people can use Norton Utilities to get at the files. I'll look around and see if I can find what I used when I did that stuff.

 

Try this:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Download the floppy or ISO images, and create a few copies. That way you can do several machines at the same time. It takes a while to wipe a disk clean.

This might run faster.