You can run any number of Linux “Live” distros…
As long as you can boot from something like a USB or DVD-ROM, you can make a bootable media and boot into a Linux distro directly, and perhaps format the disk from there.
For example, the Fedora distro: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora
– has instructions for booting from a USB stick or CD/DVD ROM
Same with Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/download
Neither image will do anything to your existing OS, so long as you don’t actually try to INSTALL the live media.
