How to format windows XP without CD?

Do you want to format the drive XP is installed on? If you want to do that, you'll need the XP CD to reinstall Windows.

This mean i can only format those drive that not store window's body?

I have not seen any replies that answer your question
I am not sure what you wish to do exactly
Do you have more than one partition ?
If only one partition you can wipe out the drive
several ways -
1) simplest is to start the computer with a windows 98 startup disk
You can get the creation tools at www.bootdisk.com
if you have a diskette its easiest
If not you can copy it onto a cd to boot from
You may have to go into your bios to change the start order to boot from that device
I guess it could be done from a flash drive but I have never done it
Boot from the windows 98 startup disk you made
( you can use it in your xp computer)
at the prompt after it boots up and finishes
says its a: type "fdisk"
3 is read the partitions
4) delete the partition
after doing it you have to reboot
If you have to delete more than one partition its basically working backwards from the way the partition were created
Its a matter of somewhat trial and error
If one way will not work - it will tell you - take another tack


second way if you are wiping out the hard drive is to determine the brand / type of hard drive you have and go to the maker for their wipe out utility
it will wipe out the drive totally writing 1's and o's to destroy everything

the utility from maxtor/seagate or western digital will be faster than 3rd parties
If you cannot find it - you can create a free disk at

www.killdisk.com

if you need to determine the brand of drive and cannot open or don't want to open your computer case
then the free belarc advisor http://belarc.com/free_download.html

may tell you
aida32 may do too if its an older computer

http://oldversion.com/program.php?n=aida32

if you are really stuck many distro's of linux have a tool builit into them to change the format type of a partition - may be a bit complex

if you only want to do one partition then the easiest way would be to get ahold of win xp disk. It will let you format a partition before asking the serial number
A previous version of windows ( say 2000) will not you go back from xp to 2000 to do this
Vista ( i believe) uses a totally different file format system than xp
I will leave that to other people more expert than myself
I hope that by the time that i have finished this explanation no one else has solved your problem and i am repeating their words

Originally Posted by visionof

I have not seen any replies that answer your question I am not sure what you wish to do exactly

Since even you aren't sure what the question is, that might be a reason why no one has given a reply answering the question.

In fact, I asked for clarification on the question.

Originally Posted by Hei

This mean i can only format those drive that not store window's body?

If you format you delete all files. So if you format the hard drive holding Windows, you will loose access to Windows. You would need a Windows CD to reinstall Windows.

Of course, if you format, you also erase the system files. It's impossible to format without a cd or other removable drive.