Is there any way to format a harddrive without the os disk? (a little long)

[DragonPoet]

Ok, so here's the deal. My mother has given me a Lenovo 3000 N100. When she gave it to me, it had a 70 gig hard drive in it. So I bought a 160 gig (actually a 140 gig, but as many of you know, a gig really isn't a gig. That's just dumb!) But I digress.. so, I bout a Apricorn Ez Upgrade Notebook Hard Drive Kit. I am running Windows XP Home. So, I cloned my hard drive onto the 160 gig and I put the original (70 gig) hard drive into the cloner. I was reading the Manual (which in all hine sight, I should have done BEFORE doing any of this) and it talks about making it into an external hard drive. In fact, it says this:

"Using the EZ Upgrade as a external backup drive
WARNING: Formatting a Hard Drive will erase everything on the drive! Please
do not reformat the original drive until you have verified that your new drive is
working properly.
After successfully copying everything over to your new drive, the EZ Upgrade
enclosure can be used as an external USB backup drive. At this point we
recommend that you wait until you are certain that your new hard drive is
working properly. When you are certain that your system is working properly,
follow these basic steps listed below to use the EZ Upgrade as a backup drive.
1. Install the old hard drive into the EZ Upgrade universal. (Please refer to
Page#6 for hard drive installation instructions.)
2. Connect the EZ Upgrade to your system.
3. Reformat the old hard drive. (See FAQ #4 on page 25 of this manual for a link
to the Microsoft website with complete instructions for both XP and Vista.)
4. Follow the instruction in the appropriate section of this manual for Cloning or
creating a backup image."

So, when my mother did give me the laptop, she didn't have any disks for it. Not even the OS disk. I called here yesterday (I don't know much about computers... I guess you can say that i'm a beginner's expert? lol) and she said that she didn't know of any way. So, my question is, is there any way that I can reformat the hard drive without the OS CD?? Thank you so much for your help. Laterz.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Err, I kind of got lost through all of that, but, just to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, you've successfully cloned the 70GB HDD to the 160GB HDD and now you want to format the 70GB HDD to use it as an external storage device?

If that's the case, just attach the 70GB HDD to your PC through whatever interface you care to, go to Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc > Ok. You should see the 70GB drive listed, right click on it and choose "Format...". This will clear the drive of data, lay the new file structure and run a chkdsk. At this point the drive can be used for storage, but it's not going to have an operating system.