hi all i have just took delivery of a computer which does not have a floppy drive , if the worst happened in the future and i had to re install windows, how do you format the hard drive if there is not a floppy for the boot disk any advice welcome

if your using XP that should boot when installed, if the BIOS is set to search for boot from CD before IDE

As said, you format using the XP CD when booting from it.

You can also use something like UBCD which contains a software called KillDisk to completely wipe it away before installing anything in a HDD.
Same procedure for booting from the CD drive rather than the HDD.