A family member was nice enough to give me her old computer since my other desktop died. It has windows 2000 pro on it, and since its got a ton of junk and is uber slow I wanted to reformat it and see if it speeds up a bit.

I do not have the window 2000 disks, nor a floppy to make a boot disk with. What I do have is the recovery cds from my laptop (XP.)

When I try to use my hp recovery disks it tells me it can't do it with external media present... so I get no where.

Can I reformat this thing?
While I hate to disagree with you answers... I have used other company's cds to do the exact same thing before, and it does work.

I just need to figure out a way to initiate the reformat.