The computer only needs to be able to boot from a bootable disk (floppy, CD, etc) that also has the tools on it that can partition and format a hard drive.

For example, if your computer has a working floppy drive, you could simply boot from a Windows 98 SE diskette and use the FDISK and FORMAT utilities that are also included on the same diskette.

Utilities to create various versions of bootdisks can be downloaded (for free) from http://www.bootdisk.com