Vista Reformat

My friends Vista Home Premium has gotten what I believe to be a virus. When starting the computer it goes to the "Start windows normally, safe mode... etc." screen. If you choose safe mood it goes through drivers and a blue screen comes up and reboots. If you choose start windows normally you get to the login screen then a blue screen shows up and reboots. The only solution I can think of is to reformat his C:/.

He did not get a vista install cd, so I have been thinking about downloading linux and installing it on his computer to get it running for a while to give us time to get a vista cd.

my questions are: how do you format a hard disk with what we are able to acess?
do you have to take out the hard drive, connect it to another computer and delete the files from there?
What is a good linux disk?

Thanks for the help in advanced. Also, I don't know if this is the right section. Mods: feel free to move it if needed.

 

If you can check the boot sequence in the BIOS, you can select it to check the CD-ROM to see if it has a bootable CD. I've heard a lot of people like Ubuntu Linux, so you could get someone to burn an install disk for you. The computer will boot off the CD, and you should be able to format and install that way.

 

Certain machines come with a dedicated partition that you can boot from (check in the bios if it appears as a boot device)