Solved Can't 'find' external HD- trying to format it

Hello! Thanks in advance for reading this, and thanks for this helpful forum.

I have a160GB external HD with three partitions. I took it out of a laptop (I was using it to run Windows on that laptop), formatted the 'main' partition (approx. 145GB), and installed Linux on it. The machine I was running Linux in is 'dead' now, so I want to format this 'main' partition again (in Windows), so I can use it for storage or whatever. The problem is that when I plug it into my machine running Vista, it 'sees' the 'recovery' partition (still there from when I was using it in the original laptop), but it doesn't 'see' that 'main' partition (the one I had Linux on). I went into Disk Management, and I can see all three partitions, but when I try to access that 'main' partition,it won't let me do anything with it. Right-clicking the partition brings up my options, but they're all grayed out. I realize that I can't open the partition in Windows, since it has Linux on it, but why can't I format it in Disk Management? I have no way to get into the Linux OS to try to uninstall or format it that way, since the machine is 'dead'.

How can I go ahead and format this partition? I hope I've explained my problem clearly enough, and I appreciate any help y'all can give me!

Solved!

Sorry for all the trouble- I solved the problem! I hadn't wanted to select the 'delete volume' option on the right-click menu (the only option that wasn't grayed out) because I thought that was just going to take the volume off the disk management tally. It doesn't- it gives me options for reformatting, which I'm doing now. Feel free to remove this post if you don't think it's helpful. Thanks anyway- I know if I hadn't figured it out, one of you would have! Cheers.