Formatting Redhat 8?

Okay so somebody gives me this harddrive they don't want anymore. Maxtor 10 gig. It's got Redhat 8 on it and I wanna make it a slave for XP. So I create a dos boot disk to format this hard drive, but all the commands I've tried to format won't work. Anybody know how I can blow this ****er off?

I think a linux forum would yield faster and more accurate results.

Good idea...

*Runs off to linux forum feeling really stupid*

[QUOTE=random]Okay so somebody gives me this harddrive they don't want anymore. Maxtor 10 gig. It's got Redhat 8 on it and I wanna make it a slave for XP. So I create a dos boot disk to format this hard drive, but all the commands I've tried to format won't work. Anybody know how I can blow this ****er off?[/QUOTE]


If you have XP, why are you creating a Dos boot disk to fDisk it? You can just use the real easy Admin tools for format any disk:

Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Disk Management.... You can reformat it in Fat or NTFS from there.

Yeah, i'm pretty sure you can just right click the drive and format it, so long as the OS you are currently using isn't on that hard disk.

Nos.

yeah you can format them either way.
But there can be some small ghost files left on that drive...but that shouldn't bother you in any way...
What I've learned at work is that the only way to really format a hard drive is with a program called Partition Magic.
We use it at work because every now and then those small files have fugged up somethings...

Yeah I right clicked the drive to make the dos disk. Turns out something appears to be corrupt on this hard drive, so I can't run the format from linux.

The only way to completely wipe out a HD is to do a low level formatting - something like "Zero Fill" or something like that. basically resets everything to a bunch of 0's .... Re installing or formatting doesn't really wipe out the information, but deletes the tables that store where and how the data is stored - that is why you can reformat a disk many many times and still with the right tools you can retrieve whatever data was on it.

But search for something along that lines and it can wipe out those corrupted sectors. Things that cause bad sectors are hard shutdowns, corrupted files stored to your hd (it's best to shutdown properly, then wait a bit, then reboot whenever you have a major program crash.)