My son at college has a Toshiba Satellite A45.  Windows has quit working and he wants a total new re-install of Win XP.  When you bootup from the recovery disc, there is no option for re-install, just recovery.  So I assume we need to do a format and partition first, then re-install.  My question, can you use one of the HDD manufacturers disc wizards to format and partition HDD's from other manufacturers?   The HDD in this computer is a Toshiba and I can download Seagates, Western Digital, etc and it will help to do this work on the HDD in lieu of doing in DOS.

Thanks,
Bob

Sorry, but each manufacturer's software works only on their hard drives. :(
What you get trying it with a different HD is a message that it detected no Western Digital [for example] hard drive on the system.