Wipe my External HDD Install of Ubuntu 7.10

[Mattaus]

This is so simple I’m embarrassed to even ask...I managed to get around all the tricky problems and installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my Western Digital External HDD.

The time has come for me to wipe that drive and use it for back up now yet I can't do it! If I plug it into my Vista machine at home it doesn’t even see the drive so I can’t reformat it, and here at work (were the drive is now, so I'd like to solve the problem here) I’m using Fedora 9 I think. Not strictly Ubuntu but I guess this is more of a general question.

Does anyone know how I can wipe the drive clean?

Sorry as I’m certain this is simple, I'm just having one of those blonde moments, even though I have dark brown hair :D

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I had an internal HDD die the other day and I lost a lot of files that normally would have been back up onto the external HDD if it wasn’t for my Ubuntu experiment. Thankfully I now have a laptop for all my Linux needs.

[Pumalite]

Get Gparted Live CD:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
Burn to disk and boot from it. You'll recognize your external by size or because it has a Linux format.

[logos34]

[delete--didn't see you post, pumalite]

[Pumalite]

I think Gparted Live CD is useful and good to have around.

[Mattaus]

hmmm, I tried gparted but for some reason I couldnt get it to work. Might have been a dud copy. I should have another copy lying around somewhere.

[Pumalite]

The one I use is:
Gparted-Live-0.3.7-2.iso
I always only have to press 'Enter' at boot.

[Pumalite]

logos34; who knows better than I, had suggested to use gparted in Fedora 9, if you have it or you can install it, which I think is a great idea also because you will not have the problem of a mounted hard drive. If it's mounted; you have to unmounted first, to work with it.