You don’t need to format the drive. You simply need to remove all partitions on the drive. And then place it in the EX2 which will take care of the formatting.
To remove partitions you can use one of several free tools - there are many out there but right now I can only think of parted_magic (I have used this but it isn’t free…costs $10 that then allows you to download an ISO image that you burn to a blank CD and then boot from the CD which will bring you into a linux system with GUI and you can use the partition editor GParted shown in the desktop screenshot as Partition Editor → http://partedmagic.com/screenshots/ ) ).
Alternate free tools (haven’t used these but should work) are just the GParted tool itself (you need to download and burn the GParted live/boot cd iso and boot from that cd - http://gparted.org/ )) or the Paragon free version of Partition Manager ( http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-express/ ).
If this answers your question, please click the star to give me a kudo.
