If you have a raw disk you can see it in Xp's My computer/Manage/storage/Disk management. The first one you need right click with the mouse.
In Linux the best way is to use terminal commands. May take slightly longer but it works in every Linux.
In terminal mode get root privilege by "su" then followed by root password.
You should find the raw disk by command
if it is sdb then use the cfdisk program
to create the partition of the type and size you want.
To format it, say it is sdb1 and in ext3
Code:
mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1
You can use Yast to do it but the above commands work in every Linux (Red Hat uses sfdisk in lieu of cfdisk).