Need help formating a hard drive with Linux within Windows XP

[Black01Stang]

I had a hard drive that I put in an old P2-450 machine of mine to run linux. Well I finally got started putting another computer together, and my problem is, how do I format the harddrive that has linux on it? It's been over 4 years since i've fooled with Linux a lot and that was on a dual boot Win98/Linux machine, and i'm lost. I tried to hook up the hard drive to my XP machine because I was going to try and format from there, but the hard drive isn't even recognized. Can anyone help me out?

 

[Lord Evermore]

You need to initialize the hard drive in XP's Disk Management before it will be recognized. Then you SHOULD be able to remove the existing partitions.

If you can't, you can download the diagnostic software from any drive maker's website, which includes a utility to write all zeroes to the drive, erasing any partition information and all data.

 

[Kadarin]

First verify that you have the jumper setting on the drive set correctly to match the IDE cable position, be it Master, Slave, or only drive on the cable. Then verify that the BIOS is recognizing the drive properly. Once you've done this, you can use Windows to partition/format the drive. In Win2K, right click My Computer and select Manage, and then go to the disk management section. I don't have XP, but I imagine the procedure is quite similar.