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?