Utilities to format partition?

["Reuben D. Budiardja" <reubendb innovativethought com>]

Hi,
I have an old NTFS partition in my /dev/hda1. I'd like to re-format it
to ext3 partition. Is there such utility in linux/Redhat, so I don't
have to reboot and use other partition software?
I don't care about preserving data, since I simply don't need the
partition anylonger, and would like to use the available space.

Thanks in advance for any info
Reuben D. Budiardja