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.

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 ...

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