more mac hd onstall troubles, how do you reformat a mac HD

i've had nothing but bad luck trying to get my mac se/30 to accept and install to a hard drive. i recently aquired a mac branded 250mb hdd and installed it in my mac se/30. on booting the machine gets a black screen and a frowny mac icon. on attempting to install os 7.5 it sees the hdd and starts installation, it asks me to replace alot of files that are newer on the hdd and halfway through instillation it fails and asks me to try again. my thought is there is a higher OS on this hdd that is not compatibale with my se/30 and i need to reformat this hdd. i don't see this option when i attempt to install os 7.1.

The Mac Geek site might help. I found the download section has a PC tool to create a bootable Mac disk. There's not a lot on the disk, but there is a utility to format a hard disk.

Oh, nuts. Black screen with a frowning Mac is often a hardware issue. It may not be a problem with your hard drive at all. Generally speaking, if your Mac can't use a System or boot from a HDD, it'll just put up a flashing floppy disk with a ? mark on it.

You can decode the error using this chart: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA46376

well, i got it to work. I just tried installing os 7.5 (as opposed to my 7.1) and it seemed to all go fine. boots up fine from the HD now.