Sometime back, Jean's computer failed. The Computer Wombling Project had recently been given a tower PC so that was tested, the hard drive wiped and lubuntu Linux installed and passed on to Jean.
Spent a good amount of time last night and today trying to prod Jean's old computer to work - resorted to scavenging parts today.
I have a device, which I call the "Octopus" - actually a "USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE adapter with power adapter" which I used to connect the scavenged hard drive and DVD writer. I gave the hard drive a new partition table and formatted the hard drive (ext4, of course).
The computer doing the formatting etc is a Dell Latitude CPx J650GT laptop. It is a 2003 era device (used sudo dmidecode for that info) and I use it to check devices I am not completely sure of. Waste not, want not and all that. Hostname is verne, user name is jules - so the command prompt reads "jules@verne".
I used GPartED on the scavenged laptop to create the new partition table and partition and as a result the new partition was owned by "root". I tried using sudo chmod and sudo chown and sudo chgrp. Eventually, after a certain amount of time, the laptop grudgingly agreed that a non-root user could write to the drive.