Reformatting an NTFS drive in OS X

I was loaned a PC hard drive formatted to NTFS (which is notoriously difficult to remove) a little while ago. The owner had given it to a friend and both said there was nothing on the drive and there was nothing they could do with it. It so happened I was running out of room on the Mac so I went out and picked up an external box which has both Firewire and USB 2.0 on it. As soon as I plugged it in I found the three NTFS partitions. It complained I didn't have permission to do anything with it. Since there was indeed nothing useful on it I figured it would be smarter to reformat it in HFS+ (the standard Mac format).

Hunting for the instructions wasn't all that easy. I had to refer to a web page. There I found the command to perform all sorts of functions related to the hard drives was the "diskutil" command. To properly access it the user/administrator needs to go into the terminal and type the command. From there the program gives instructions on what works and how to do it. Fortunately for me it catches improperly phrased commands otherwise I would have lost the internal drive. To format an external drive use the following command as a guide...

diskutil filesystem_type new_name /dev/disk*

Within a couple of seconds, things are working like a charm.