formatting whole drives with knoppix

[dvryknopper]

so using dd to change everything on the drive to zeros won't work to format an NTFS partition?

[malaire]

so using dd to change everything on the drive to zeros won't work to format an NTFS partition?

Well, it doesn't "format" the NTFS partition - it removes it completely.
So after this operation you need to create a new NTFS partition on the disk. If you are going to install Windows, this will be done during the install when Windows detects that there are no partitions on the disk.

If you'd just format the partition, you wouldn't need to re-create it during install. And just formatting a partition wouldn't clear MBR, which is located outside of any partition.