Partition My Book into 3 partitions (Macbook Pro) Also "Connection Failed"

Hello!

I just bought a My Book World Edition (2TB), and I am very new to this sort of thing.

Right now everything seems to be working fine, but I want to do some things to the drive.

I want to set up 3 partitions of the hard drive, 1 for Hard Drive Backup, 1 for Time Machine and then Another for shared files.

I want the Backup partition to be 500GB (the size of my Macbook Pro’s hard drive), the Time Machine backup to be 750GB, and the Shared partition to be 750GB

my reasoning for this is because I have been hearing that time machine could cause problems and I don’t want to to corrupt the entire drive if something bad happens, just the partition.

I don’t know if there are any consequences in doing this, or exactly how to go about doing it. I am connect to it wirelessly, but when I open the mac’s Disk utility to reformat and partition, it’s not found. Do I need to connect it directly to the computer for this?

also, another question. Is there away to make the drive only accessible to JUST my Macbook Pro and no other computers on the network?

thanks for your time! 

Computer: Macbook Pro

OS: OSX 10.6.4

and now it’s saying “Connection Failed” in finder

I was able to connect to it earlier and now nothing.

what is going on here?

welp, now…without making any alterations at all…just trying to use the drive…it is acting strange

randomly disconnecting, and now it wont even connect at all to the drive…it should be that hard to just use the device how it’s meant to be used…

going to return it for something that works better

Sorry, nobody got back to you.  You can’t reformat the drive anyway.  The partition and format of the drive is handled internally to the drive and it’s in EXT3, a Linux format.  A network drive is designed to function with Shares, not partitions.  You create a folder that becomes a share, and that share has to be mapped to be seen and accessed by your computers over the network.  Windows may show you the folders under Network, but each network folder should be mapped to be effectively used without issues.