I had an old Windows machine which recently died. So I decided to put the hard drive into my Ubuntu server. This hard drive is currently NTFS file format, the Disk info is as follows

 description: ATA Disk
 product: SAMSUNG HD502HI
 physical id: 0.0.0
 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
 logical name: /dev/sdb
 version: 1AG0
 serial:
 size: 465GiB (500GB)
 capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
 configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000c6181

**Part One**

I need to get some files of this hard drive, but when I try to mount the hard drive all that seems to mount is the `/boot` partition. Here is what I am doing

Edit `fstab` and add the following: 

 /dev/sdb /media/Microsoft ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

Then after this I mount using the following command

 sudo mount -ro /dev/sdb /media/Microsoft 

Can some one tell me what I am doing wrong, and how I can mount the right partition?

**Part Two**

Once I have successfully mounted the hard drive and copied the files. How do I go about formatting the hard drive and make it usable for my Linux system? From what I have read I have to do something like

 mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb

then create a partition using `fdisk`

Can some one direct me to what I actually need to do?