You can format an external hard drive in Ubuntu using the Gnome Partition Editor. It provides a graphical interface to simplify formatting and resizing hard drive partitions, even on external drives.

Fedora Linux makes sharing data with your workers or between devices at your office simple with "Disks," a partitioning and formatting utility.

My windows install was giving me a lot of grief today, (kept freezing while formatting the hard drive) so I popped in a Mandrake 8.0 disc just to see if the install would complete.Anyways, now ...

Our Verdict A very worthy alternative to Acronis for disk chores. Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite is a welcome upgrade of an already capable partitioning and imaging suite from Paragon Software.