formatting a windows hard drive

[rubberduck]

so i searched the forums a little bit for the answer i was looking for to no avail so now i start a new post. a little background, not because it will help in solving my problem but just because i think its kind of funny. so i picked up a 30 gig western digital hard drive at the swap meet/flea market for a dollar this weekend because i need some extra space. and you have to admit that a buck for 30 gigs isnt a bad deal. so i put the thing in my computer, and boot up knoppix, seeing as this would be the best way to look at what might be on it without unleashing the plague onto my windows partition (i have a dual boot winblows XPee, Kubuntu system) and to no suprise the thing was loaded with porn, proabably illeagal music, and hundreds of what are supposedly ziped up keygens to random windows programs. it was fun going thru someone elses herpies infested hard drive for a dollar and that alone was worth what i paid for it but now it is time to wipe it clean and make room for my own pirated music and random tidbits. now of course the problem im having is that knoppix makes everything read only. if someone could point me in the direction of maybe a tutorial on how to use knoppix to mount and format this new hard drive i would greatly appreciate it. maybe even post something up in here explaining how to do it. im still rather new to linux, i know you can use fdisk to do such a task but knowing i can use fdisk and knowing how to set it up so i can use fdisk is two different things. any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Harry Kuhman]

Knoppix defaults to opening partitions as read only, but it can easily change to mounting as read/write if you are talking about a FAT partition. If the partition is NTFS than you stay with read/write (5.0.1 claims "limited" ability to write to NTFS, whatever that means, but I'll wait for others to risk their disk on this bleeding edge technology and report back before I try or advocate that). You didn't say which partition type you have.

If the disk has one or more FAT partitions and you just want to erase the old data then see answer #6.

I suggest however that you delete the partitions on the disk entirely and then create a new partition and format it with whatever format type you select based on the OS or OSs that will be using it. If using windows I would use the windows tools to format it, particularly if use XP and want a NTFS partition.

It would be wise to rewrite the MBR as well, on the chance that there is a MBR virus hiding there. This would not be a problem if the disk stays the secondary drive, but if it ever becomes the primary drive in a system down the road then a lingering MBR virus could come back to haunt you.