Dear Friends

I have a 40 Gigabyte Maxtor IDE hard disk which is detected with linux. I wanted to delete everything in this hard disk and make it ready for windows operating system (Fat 32 or NTFS) I tried partition magic 8.0, but it does not detect hard disk. It gives me Init failed Error 100. I also tried Maxtor software. It detects the HDD, but when I want to do low level format done, it gives me an error message again. Is there any downloadable software to alter the os of this hard disk totally?
This HDD is connected via USB connector to computer. I think it does not affect the situation.

If you want it fat32, and linux sees it fine, use parted to prep the disk and mkfs.vfat to format it.

Use a Linux live CD like Knoppix and issue

That will zero out the drive. It will take 10 min maybe.

Then put in your windows CD and install Windows.

You can also try to boot your windows CD to the recovery prompt and issue
fixmbr for XP
fdisk/mbr for Win 98
Then install windows.
Windows is such a hog that it will overwrite everything. It doesn't know how to do simple things like write a MBR though.

I find better luck just zeroing the drive.