Formatting a Hard Drive.

I recently upgraded a computer with a new motherboard and processor. Since the computer was totally messed up before and had viruses and was very slow I would get the blue screen of death while starting up windows. Then I put the hard drive into my computer so I can format it and back up some stuff. I got the hard drive working and cleaned it of viruses and now I'm going to backup some stuff and format it. The hard drive I am formatting has windows xp on it and I've never done this before but is there anything I should do so I can use the hard drive on the other computer once formatted or can i just do the right-click->format thing?

 

Have a look here:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=25831

 

I saw that but in that situation the hard drive is in the computer and it is formatted using the windows xp setup. I am asking whether I can do the right-click->format way with a hard drive that has an operating system on it and is set to slave.

 

You should be able to, even if it is slave.

If, and ONLY if, that OS is not running on that drive.