My Book Reformatting Questions

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Just acquired my second WD external drive, a 1.5 TB Home Edition, for use with Win XP Pro.  Wanting to change from FAT32 to NTFS,  I followed the well-written instructions in Answer ID 207.  After deleting the existing partition, I progressed through selection of partition type and size, etc.

Wound up with a primary partition of only 8 MB and unallocated space remaining of  1397 GB.  Went through the Windows Partition Wizard a second time and created an Extended partition to enable the rest of the WD drive.  Problem is, the tiny 8 MB primary partition has a logical drive letter and so does the extended partition.  And, the system did  not employ a quick format - it is still chugging along after 4 hours and only 50% complete.

The example result shown in Step 12 of Answer 207 shows only a single partition.

QUESTION 1: Should I delete the two new WD partitions and try again?

QUESTION 2: If it is not possible to create a single partition then should I make the first one larger than 8 MB, to accommodate the allocation table?  What is the recommended size?

QUESTION 3:  Assuming I will need to make two partitions, should the second also be a primary, as opposed to the extended one I created initially?

QUESTION 4:  And finally, should I select a specific allocation unit size, other than default?  The primary content of this drive will be AVI video files ranging from 100-600 MB, plus VOB files of approximately 1 GB.

Thanks!

2

Hello, can I ask what HD you purchased? And, why you have partitioned the drive?

3

Model purchased: 1.5 TB My Book Home Edition, for use with Win XP Pro. 

Did NOT want to partition the drive, simply wanted to change from FAT32 to NTFS file system.

Following the WD instructions (which reiterate Win XP drive management procedure), a small 8 MB primary partition was automatically created, leaving the balance of the 1.5 TB drive unallocated.  Hence the need for a second partition in order to have storage space.

Make sense?

4

You didn’t need to delete the partition in the first place. You could have just reformatted it as NTFS.

Now you got to delete everything and start all over.   In step 7 of those instructions, somehow you

put 8 in there.  Be sure to leave it as the default full drive.

5

I would like to use the 1Tb My Book  drive for both Windows and Linux file systems.

Can that large partition be deleted before repartitioning (as I would do for a standard hard drive). I dont want to use Smartware. It scares me and I dont want to end up with a useless harddrive with warranty void!