Plug it in, jumper 'em right, make certain the machine's BIOS is set to autodetect on the IDE channels, and then while booting, see what the drive registered as... probably /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd if you put them on the second IDE controller.
Then:
cfdisk /dev/hdc
That'll show you if they're at least partitionable. Partition them as you like. (You might be stuck with the more archaic "fdisk")
mkfs -t ????? /dev/hdc1
Where ????? is vfat, msdos, ext2, ext3, etc... If you drop them in a windows box later, it'll partition and format them all over again.
badblocks /dev/hdc1
That'll check for bad blocks on the drive, if too many show up... its about to eat itself.
Also, if any of the the newer drives are s.m.a.r.t. capable, you may want to turn that on in BIOS and then run smartd on them so the drive itself will tell you its status... smart is about as new as ATA33 so only the 10Gb~ will have it.
Cheers,
Finegan
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