I recently purchased a Western Digital 120 GB external hard drive, and it comes preformatted as a single FAT32 partition.

I would like to change it to the NTFS format (which I have heard is better) and create 2 partitions. I went to "Disk Management," and the drive is showing as the dark blue color for "primary partition." If I right-click on it, it will not allow me to create a new partition. I see with the "Format" option that I can make it NTFS, but that doesn't help with creating 2 partitions. Is it safe to delete this partition and start anew?

This is new territory for me, and I am nervous about doing this. I have nothing on this external hard drive yet, and I did not use the CD installation software that came with it. I believe the only thing on that CD is the software for assistance in making back-ups of my files. I would like to use one partition as a back-up for my regular files and another partition for video editing down the line.

Hope someone can help...thanks!

if there is no data on the drive...then yes y ou can safely delete the partition without problems...also WD should have sent a disk with the drive for formatting and partitioning..if they didn't you can go to their website and dl that utility

Thanks for the quick response!

O.K. if I delete the partition...if I then do the format to NTFS, would I be able to create 2 partitions at that time or after the fact?

I had read somewhere that I should avoid using Western Digital's software until after I had reformatted it to NTFS. Thoughts on this?

i don't see why you would need to wait till the drive is formatted to use the WD software....the WD software is designed to partition...then format...plus...you can't format untill you partition...so that info seems bogus to me

if you do it through disk management..you would delete the current partitioin...then repartition...then format the partitioins you created

O.K. Thanks so much for your help...I think you had helped me with something else a long time ago (I recognized the monkey avatar!).