Format Fdisk Virus

I mentioned to a friend I was looking for a cheap hard drive, and he offered me a 40gigger for free. When I asked why, he said he had several viruses on it and rather than bother with it he just bought a new, larger one. I haven't dealt with formatting a contaminated drive since windows for workgroups, so I was wondering what has changed since then.

Is it true that fdisk and format are not enough to remove the pests from my platters? I want to install XP but I don't need more trouble than microsoft includes already. Is there a freeware utility/windows command line app that will do this on any vendor's drives?

http://fdisk.radified.com/
here is an excellent fdisk tutorial with links for fdisk if you dont have it. its printable, and pretty straight forward. i have used it and ran fdisk on several occasions. as far as fdisk not getting rid of bugs, i dont know of any data that can survive on a hdd after format and removal of all partitions, then reinstalling a basic dos partition so you can load xp or whatever os you want.

If you want to be absolutely certain that the disk is clean, then download the drive manufacturers utility to put the drive back into it's factory fresh condition. That should write zeros to all the sectors and rewrite the boot sector.

That's probably overkill, though, fdisk & format should be enough.

Thanks for the responses. I guess I'm just paranoid... I wonder where I heard that from. I pick up the drive tonite so I guess I'll find out soon who makes it.