i just bought a box of hard drives and was wondering how to use linux to test and format the drives before i use them. i've searched google but haven't found the info I'm looking for. all the drives are notebook ide ranging from 800mb to 20gb.

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