If you are working within Windows and trying to prepare for use a fully functional hard drive, the Windows tools are in Disk Manager. I'm not in VISTA, but it must be similar to XP, so here's how to get there. Click Start, and on that menu RIGHT-click My Computer, and choose Manage. In the resulting window, expand Storage if needed, and choose Disk Management. The window will have on the right two scrolling panes. The upper one shows you all the devices currently in use by Windows, while the lower one shows you these (with other info) plus other connected devices Windows can't use yet. Right-clicking on a device in the lower right pane gives you menus for operations.
You refer to "Formatting" a hard drive, but there really are two steps involved (and possibly three). The first step MAY be removing any existing Partitions (assuming, of course, that you have no need for the data you will destroy) so that the entire disk is Unallocated Space. Then you do a two-step Partition and Format for each volume you want to create. On a physical hard drive unit you can create one or several Partitions, each of which will be treated as separate drives with their own letter names. As long as you have current equipment and OS (you do from your specs) you can make one large Partition or Volume using the entire drive space if you wish to. Or, you can set the size smaller than that and come back later to create another Partition in the remaining Unallocated Space.
The first Partition you create will always be the Primary Partition. Behind the scenes the operation writes information at the start of the hard drive that includes the starting place, size and type of Partition, and I-don't-know-what-else. If you later come back and create a second Partition or more, it simply adds that information to this Partition Table.
When the Primary Partition is created, one option is to make it bootable. You do this if the drive will be used as the system boot drive (that also includes multi-boot situations) and you will install on it an Operating System. A bootable drive has a data pointer to it placed in the MBR and Partition table at the start of the drive, and the OS installation will have to place key files in specific locations on the drive. You don't do any of this yourself - the installation system does that. But if you are not going to boot from this drive, you do not mark it as bootable.
That all reserves physical space, but it's still not ready to use by the OS. For each Partition you create, again in Disk Manager you must right-click on the Partition in the lower right pane and Format it. Formatting creates (for just this one Partition) all the data structures (like a root directory and tables to track the allocation of sectors to files) the OS will need to actually use this disk. In the process you have the option to select which type of File System you want this disk to use. For most uses now you need the NTFS File System which handles very large drives. There are special situations that require the use of older systems like FAT32, but don't do that unless you know you need it. If you have created more than one Partition, you must format each separately.
In doing the format operation, you usually have the option of Quick or Full format. A Quick Format creates all the data structures required and leaves the disk ready to use. Unlike the early days of floppy disks, the magnetic signals on the disk that mark the tracks and sectors are already there, placed by the HDD maker. A Full Format does the Quick thing and then runs a write-and-read test on every sector of the disk, marking any faulty spots in a table so it will never be used. On large current disks this is a many-hour operation (overnight is good) and often considered unnecessary with a new disk. For a used HDD with suspected problems it's a good idea.
After these things are done you escape back out of the Disk Manager system and reboot the machine. All the Partition(s) you created and Formatted should show up in My Computer as individual drives with their own names and no contents yet, ready for use by Windows.
When you install Windows from a CD it does all of this for you before installing files onto the disk thus prepared. The process usually offers you a chance to customize the operation slightly. So the install disks usually have all the utilities for these operations, and they are another source of the tools you can use if you are not operating within Windows in the first place.
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