That is the problem xD He can't reformat because his disk drive is no longer even picked up by windows D: I had the same problem with an Acer Aspire X1700 :P New CD drive and it worked flawlessly :P I was TVing with him and I saw that there was a disk drive in the device manager but not picked up under "My Computer"
I was trying to walk him through a reformat with Windows Seven XP Extreme Edition