Forum Thread: please help

What do you want to format on your computer? What is the make of your motherboard? The more specific you can be, the better.

I hear things like this all the time, in all honesty unless your computer has either the newest hardware or the most scarce you won't need a CD for the drivers on the board.  In fact all you really need is the ethernet driver, since you can easily download all drivers once reformatted (although it may suck looking at a 640x480 screen at first).  If you are using a *nix distro it may be a little bit tougher since most drivers are provided by the community.  On the other hand, if you are using the newest Windows OS the HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) will most likely have enough bloat to get you up and running to connect to their update servers.  Now if he is referring to the OS restore CD that came with the computer, which contains the licensed OS, you may be out of luck since he is likely attempting to avoid copyright issues.  Once again though, most manufacturers these days place a PE (pre-installation environment) image on a small partition of the provided HDD. Hope he hasn't wiped that off the disk yet, and I hope that helps!