so i just installed xandros 3.0 on to my primary hard drive and everything runs fine. but i want to know how i can format and partition my 2nd hard drive so that it can be used. currently it is ntfs and is read only. i tried to use fdisk but it didn't work. so i need to know how to format and partition it.

THANK YOU!!!

fdisk must work ;P, try cfdisk it is easier to use
then use mkfs to format partition you've made

when i tried fdisk, it said there were no logical drives, so i went to delete the extended and it said i cant do that until i've deleted the logical. where do i get cfdisk and mkfs??? i'm only new to linux cause stupid windows kept pissing me off. stupid hack piece of shit

i don't use that distro, but mkfs and cfdisk should be there, you must be logged in as root, it should be in /sbin directory
try man mkfs, man cfdisk

ummm. can you please explain what i'm meant to do??

From what I understand about what you want to do. Put the drive in the machine and boot up. Once you get into linux at a bash prompt type cfdisk and take it from there. The fdisk on a Window$ boot disk will not work.

Remember when invoking cfdisk and or fdisk, you have to specify the drive.

If its going to be the secondary drive on the primary controller.. it would be /dev/hdb

So doing:

cfdisk /dev/hdb

Would launch cfdisk to start editing your partitions for your disk. I've installed Xandros once and it seemed pretty limited to what is installed, do a locate or whereis for cfdisk to see if it's actually installed.

And if you want to get rid of the logical crap fdisk outputs when trying to use that, you can always wipe the partition info from the drive by doing a:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=1024 count=1024

But be very careful not to invoke that command on any drive you have data you intend to keep. And the X represents the drive letter, depending on what controller the drive is connected to.