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if it is too difficult to swap out drives in the laptop, you may want to use a floppy utility to erase the drive. the easiest thing to do here that is guarenteed to work would be to figure out who made your hard drive (my best guess is probably hitachi) and go to their website and download their drive diagnosticd disk. most likely it includes a function to erase the disk, or a function to write zeros to the whole disk (which acomplishes the same task).
lastly, and probably the easiest thing, is to boot to a windows cd and go through the motions like you were installing windows, up to the part where it asks you to format the drive. just let it run through the format part, then shut it down when it's done, before it copies the windows files to it, and you'll be all good after that.
probably the quickest option would be to boot to a windows 98 or windows Me floppy disk, and delete the partition with the fdisk utility. you will be able to delete any partition, even ntfs and linux partitions with fdisk, you just won't be able to format it in anything other than fat32. don't worry about formatting though, if you delete the partition, the person who gets the drive next would need to use some pretty snazzy utility to recover any data from the drive after that.
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