New box + reformatting hdb1

[Kevin Brown]

Don't know if this is a solution, but if you have a program like Partition Magic
around you can destroy the partitions on hdb so that there are no Fat32
partitions on it and then try to install.  Hopefully that Asus MBs BIOS can
identify a drive larger than 8GB (this used to be a problem).

If the hard drives were already formatted when you got them, then they were not
new/unopened.  I've seen Fry's sell "new" drives that already had partitions and
files on them.  No new hard drive should have any partitions or formatting.

> 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.