How do I format a hard drive for data recovery?

Hi,
My intel iMac got written over with a bootable Windows XP. So I hooked up my sister's Powerbook PPC and in target disk mode I'm running File Salvage which is finding hundreds of thousands of files.
Just ordered a G-Tech Quadra 500GB drive from Apple which is supposed to arrive Thursday. For now I'm going to save the File Salvage findings and then import them back to my sister's laptop to move to my new hard drive.
I've never owned an external drive so a few questions. Do I need to format the drive first and if so how? Do I then need to load OSX Tiger onto the new drive? If so how do I do that? Am I using the OSX install on my sister laptop and booting that to my external drive? Or am I putting my intel version of OSX in my iMac and booting that to the external drive? A little confused how this all works.
Can I partition the drive later on since I'll need at least 160GB to store all the files that File Salvage finds from my iMac.
Ideally I'd like to partition the drive load Tiger on there and transfer over my files from one partition to the Tiger partition to make sure everything is intact first before doing and erase and install on my iMac. Is this possible and if so how? Which Tiger disk would I use the Powerbook or the iMac one?
S.

spiralgirl wrote:
I got my drive and am about to partition but notice it's already been formatted at the factory but instead of being 500 GB it's like 465.5 GB and says that 180.8 MB have been used and there are 4 folders and 10 files when I look at the drive itself in Disk Utility.
You are experiencing the "myth of the megabyte." Consider my MacBook Pro's "160 GB" hard drive. Disk Utility reports that the Total Capacity is "149.1 GB (160,041,885,696 Bytes)." See the trick: The size, when expressed in billions of bytes is less than the capacity expressed in GB, because each conversion from bytes to kilobytes (kB) to MB to GB involves a factor of 1/1024 (remember, this is binary math).
So, scaling from my MacBook's internal drive:
500 "GB" x 149 GB / 160 "GB" = 466 GB
sounds like your drive is just about right.
I doubled clicked the drive and see nothing inside so not sure why it's saying 10 files and 4 folders.
Spotlight, Trash, and other "housekeeping" functions create hidden files. I don't understand why they would be taking up so much space on an empty drive (181 MB), but that won't matter once you repartition.
Should I erase the drive first before partitioning it? Or just go ahead an partition?
The process of partitioning, which is followed by formatting (see my previous post) will obliterate anything left on the drive (beyond the physical demarcation of sectors necessary for the drive to operate).
So, if there is nothing on the drive to be preserved, you may proceed immediately.
Please write back to let us know how things went.
Message was edited by: Steve Davidson

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