New box + reformatting hdb1

[Robert N. Eaton]

Hi all,

About a month ago my PII233 box died, and, rather than repair it I
decided to replace it with a home-built.  I have a 1.2 GHz Athlon
Thunderbird, an Asus A7M266 mb, 512 Megs of 266MHz DDR memory, and two
IBM dma100 7200rpm 40 Gig hd's.  Oh, yes.  I also installed a Swiftech
MC462-A heat sink.  Decent hardware.

I had been having trouble getting things to play well together, and my
son-in-law offered to look at it for me while my wife and I took a short
vacation to Park City.  When I got home things were running well.  Tim
had installed Win98 on hda1 and I was able to install all my M$ software
on the first hard-drive.

However, when I tried to install my copy of RH 7.1 on hdb it kind of
choked because the hard-drive was formatted FAT 32.  I don't know if Tim
did me a "favor", or if the hard-drives were formatted from the
factory.  At any rate, I can't install StarOffice 5.2 because I don't
have enough unclaimed disk space on a 40 Gig hd!

I guess what I'm asking is: How can I low level format hdb so I can
reclaim it for Linux?  The RH Druid wouldn't do it (or anything much
else.)  Whenever I thought I had it nailed, Disk Druid wouldn't let me
proceed to the next step.  Fdisk, which needs a lot of information,
wasn't helpful.  Oddly enough, Disk Druid had the information that fdisk
requires, but they don't talk to one another.

Any help would be appreciated.

Bob Eaton