admin removal

hello, just received a hand me down point of sale machine from my employer,
it, along with about 20 other identical machines, was being donated to a tech school and were replaced with upgraded machines.

i asked if i could take one home as the tech school never responded to our I.T. directors offer. I.T said no problem, rummage through them and take what you want, ok, cool i thought. i needed an older machine (these are m851 motherboards, 2 gigs ram, 2.4ghz) to run win2k, because im a designer, and the proud owner of a wacom digitizer 2, the only 12"x12" model they have ever made, problem is its old, and isnt compatible with any OS above win2k. my old tower finally gave out, and i was excited to have a replacement.

They told me they had pulled all the drives, no problem i thought, i have a new 500gig at home, well, when i started pulling parts, i found that many of them still had drives in them. the one i ended up taking home had a 40gig
drive in it with winxp pro on it. i tried installing my drive, no avail. i think i may have tried to format it with win2k while attempting to salvage my old tower.

heres my problem then, because this was a point of sale machine, and had working drive in it, all of the admin restrictions are still on the drive. i cant install an out dated os, delete the admin account, or create one that doesnt conflict with the trust agreement with their domain. im not much of an I.T.
guy, i can build a comp, but if i cant even format my large drive because of this old admin crap they probably dont even have records for, is their a way
to do a forced format or admin deletion or command prompt action that will allow me to wipe the drive so i can re-install without paying crazy money
for some shareware?

any advice would be helpful, this is driving me nuts, the comp works great,
but im stuck in admin hell from 3 years ago and cant get around it

 

Go to this link and download Dariks DBan http://www.dban.org/about full instructions are given and quite easy to follow, then you'll be able to start again !

 

If you jsut boot from the Win2K CD it should allow you to format the HDD as part of the install process.

 

Or even an old Win98 startup floppy, if the CD route gives you trouble, and if the machines have an A: drive...

 

Yeah this would be cool what collins says, but only if you have a boot cd to start with !

 

If you do not have the CD then I cannot see how you can reinstall, but to aid further, you may be able to use GPARTED to wipe the drive.

GPARTED: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

i appreciate all of the help, i'll give the software a shot, just one problem about booting
with a win2k cd though, when i tell the BIOS to boot from cd, and it goes through its drive detection, then tries to read the cd, i get this error message, "boot failure, boot record not found", that goes for all of my discs except a winxp pro sp3 disc i have, but the winxp disc i think is incomplete, because after installation, lets say i open a folder on my drive, there are functions missing, like the "view" function when right clicking inside of a folder.i should have a list of choices, like view by name,list,size etc. this function is not available, its just weird. my win2k discs all produce the same result when booting from them, "no boot record found", and ive used these discs to format multitudes of drives in the past so i know its not the disc.

also, after a fesh install AND format of winxp on a brand new single partition on this drive that is in there now, (a spare 80gig maxtor), when it boots it boots to the "choose operating system" screen, and lists winxp 3 times! after i just deleted, formated and created a new partition after a raw format, how is this possible?
which had xp on it in the past,

 

These issues may be resolved after using GPARTED as it sounds as if the computer is skipping booting from the Win2K CDs and is jumping straight to the wiped HDD.

 

well, i used gparted after it was first mentioned in this thread, and yes, it recognized both my main drive AND slave drive. i was able to delete the partition on each drive. however, not only did both of the drives still have
missing space on them, about 5g missing from the 80g main drive, and
a whopping 45g from the 500g slave, when i reformatted i installed a fresh copy of winxpsp3 (32 bit obviously) on the main drive. jumpers are set appropriately - master on main, slave on slave etc, after installation, boot still tells me that cmos settings are wrong. this happens every time i reboot the machine, and after setting the cmos properly, upon booting, it still prompts me for the OS i want to boot from, this time, winxp or win2k. how after using gparted and a raw, fresh format and install is it still picking up win2k? And more importantly, why is the mobo not saving the cmos settings? im starting to get very frustrated with this machine....after booting up winxp it runs fine....only run into problems when i reboot.

on top of all that, the integrated graphics on this board blow, so i tried installing a pny verto geforce 8400gs 512mb pci card. after booting XP,
i try to install the drivers from the pny disc. after about 30 sec, the screen
goes black and it reboots winxp from the xp loading screen. I dont think its
the card because i used it on my old INTEL D850MV socket 478 board which used rambus ram, which is older than this board, and was running win2k....now im confused..rolleyes,

 

It's possible that the CMOS battery is dying - it's an easy swap, if you can find the correct replacement battery...

 

that is a possibility i hadnt considered, after all, it was sitting in a warehouse
for several months not being used.....

 

Do you have enough power to run the new video card?

 

yes, the video card is rated to not be used with any power supply under
300w. i am using a 400w power supply and the card model does not need supplemental power ie: does not have its own supplemental power connectors.