Displaying message on boot

Hi guys, I wasn't really sure where to put this, but basically I am a ubuntu user and I use it on my desktop computer given to me by my job, and last time it was time for an upgrade, I used the guttman method to wipe the hdd before giving it back to them. After doing that, I mailed it out and they received it and said the hdd was damaged and could not be used again. But I think they are just stupid and turned it on and nothing came up so they thought it was broke.

So this time I want to do the wipe again but I want to somehow make a message come up on the screen when they turn it on saying something like "This hdd was wiped, procede to install OS" or something like that. Is there any bootloader or bootsector trick that can display a simple message like that? without having an os or anything big installed

My answer is not exactly what you are looking for I believe. But is that system a dual boot with windows? In that case just formatting linux partition (if that is really what you want) and fixing windows bootloader won't do?

Why not just do a minimal install of Ubuntu after wiping the disk so it'll boot but there won't be anything there.

Well no it is not a dual boot, and yes I could just install SOMETHING on there so it boots up, but that's not the cool way to do it hehe. It has to be slick, hdd wiped except for a simple message explaining what happened. :)

Over night I thought about it and I might just make a ~5MB partition with grub on it, and in my menu.lst I will put something in there for the title and have a very long pause before auto booting.

But just for future reference, anyone have another good idea? some trick to make it happen?

well i think it can be done but not sure how, instead of the name of the operating system we can simply show your message that this doesn't contain any OS. But you will need to have a partition on HDD as grub needs file to read from the partitons. The lilo boot loader would do the trick here as the FSBL is installed in the boot sector of MBR and changing the lable to "NO OS" in lilo.conf might work what say?