Harddrive scrubbing software for OS X & windows

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OK, this may be crazy but I would appreciate your suggestions. I have several internal hard drives loaded with XP that I would like to use as external drives for my iMac. I need to scrub these hard drives and format them for OS X. Is there software for scrubbing these old hard drives that will run on my iMac. If not, I am using Parallels to run a Virtual Machine with Windows 7 on my iMac. Can I scrub these drives using Windows 7? Finally, these are old internal drives (Like the Western Digital Caviar 3100) and are not USB2 drives. So, I am wondering what would be the best way to hook up a couple of these drives as external drives for my iMac. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Connect them up via an external caddy and they should appear in Disk utility. Select by highlighting and hit erase and format Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Go into Partition > Options and ensure GUID is selected.
 
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And USB external enclosures are very easy to find. Just make sure you buy the right enclosure for your hard drive (IDE vs SATA). You can look at newegg.com, macsales.com, ebay, or lots of other sites.
 
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Harryb2448 & Caribiner23: When I connect my HD via USB I get the following error window: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize, Ignore, eject

The hard drive has Windows XP on it. Does the above mean that my iMac can't read the drive or is the drive busted. Should I simply initialize the drive or . . .?
 
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You want to Initialize it. That's OSX-speak for "Format."
 
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reading external Windows drive with iMac

You want to Initialize it. That's OSX-speak for "Format."

Thanks, caribiner23 that is what I figured. The second question is more important, i.e., is it possible to read the drive using my VM Windows 7 (not installed yet)? I would like to read the drive and perhaps save some files before I format it.
 
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If it's NTFS formatted you should be able to attach it and it should be seen by your virtual Win7 machine.
 

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