incredible newbie here. I need to format an external usb hard drive. I think it may be corrupt which is why i want to format. I don't know how to go about this in linux. But i tried to do it in windows and it wouldn't let me. I would like this drive to be used for music etc... Please let me know if there is any way to make it able to use both WinXP and Mandrake.

I'm sure windows will let you do it. Right click My Computers ->Management, go to Disk management and your external drive will show up if it's plugged in. If it doesn't, you probably have a bigger problem than formatting. Format the drive. Make sure NOT to use ntfs but to use FAT32 so that you can read/write from linux.

Also, mandrake control center -> mount point will let you do it as well. But I had the problem that it wouldn't let me create more than one FAT32 partitions bigger than 4.2G or so (So I could create one 10Gig partiton but I couldn't add another of that size...) The external drive should show up as sda or sdb, sdc; whatever is not your internal drive.