I have 2 of these. And I will tell you if you format the hard drive in another machine it will give you errors, and not install correctly. Because the partitioning will be incorrect, old school hard drive metrics. There is a way to do it but it is quit involved, and a big pain. The best way is to shop ebay and get one of the docking stations for it, they are cheap now.

Then you will need to make a boot floppy, because the BIOS does not support USB bootup. The dock has the NIC port on it. And the Fujitsu floppy is not the expensive now, either. I suggest you get one of the IR keyboards while you are at it. It Is A BIG PLUS.

The first thing you should do, but I know its to late now. Is to contact Fujitsu. They installed these things with a hidden partition. They can guide you to reinstall the entire OS from this partition, maybe even if someone wiped it. I wish I would have done this with my first one. They also installed them with a special version of windows. I think they still sell the Windows 2K CD's for about $35.00.

Anyway you should contact them they were very helpful with me.

I just installed Linux on my first one, and on the second one reinstalled Windows 2K from the hidden partition, in-spite of the primary partition being wiped.

For my first one, I was able to make a boot floppy that enabled the system to read a USB thumb drive (where I had the "install from network" iso) and then installed Linux over the internet.

Like I said, I know it is probably to late for you, but I hope this helps others out. These are great units despite their age.