Here is a set of good instructions from Western Digital (note that the instructions provided should be the same regardless of which hard drive you have):
To partition and format the external hard drive with Disk Management, follow these steps:
- Access Disk Management in Windows XP or Vista. From the Start Menu, Left click on the Start button, Right-click on My Computer or Computer, left-click on Manage, and then left-click on Disk Management.
- In the lower window pane, you will see a list of available IDE devices. Locate the desired hard drive to partition and format. You should see a black bar indicating unallocated space for the drive.
- Important: If there is no black bar shown (if the bar is blue), the hard drive currently has a partition. Please verify that there is no important data on the hard drive before continuing with the directions below. Right-click on the blue bar and choose the option to Delete Partition. The bar should then turn black indicating unallocated space.
- Right-click on the black bar (unallocated space) to see a menu of available options. Select New Partition or New Simple Volume from the menu of available options.
- The Welcome to the New Partition Wizard or New Simple Volume Wizard appears. Windows Vista users, please proceed to step #6. For Windows XP users, Left-click on Next to continue and select Primary. Left-click on Next.
- Select the size of the partition you wish to create and left-click on Next.
- At the next screen, select a drive letter to assign to the partition and left-click on Next.
- The Format Partition screen appears. On this screen you can select the file system, allocation unit size, and volume label you wish to create on the drive.
Note: In almost all cases, it is best to leave the allocation unit size at default. If you are not dual-booting and do not need to use this drive on a Windows 98 SE or Windows ME computer, it is also recommended that you use NTFS as the file system (you can also select FAT16 or FAT32). Dynamic partitions cannot be created on an external hard drive. The Windows 2000 and Windows XP Disk Management utility cannot support the format of a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. Please refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 184006 for additional information. - Left -click on Next to verify the process and the choices you selected.
- Left-click on Finish to complete the process.
I hope this helps, but if not, let us know exactly where you're having problems and we can try to resolve it from there.
Wow, this is an old thread.
In any case, yes, you can format the drive by using the method I wrote out above. Here's a slightly faster way:
(Note: Following these instructions will erase everything on your Western Digital drive (or another hard drive, if you're not careful!) Be sure to back up any important data you have before doing this, and if you're unsure of what you're doing, stop immediately -- Neither myself nor Future Shop are responsible for any loss of data or other issues that might arise from following these instructions.)
- Click Start, right-click 'Computer', then left-click Manage.
- When the Computer Management window comes up, click on Disk Management.
- You'll see a list of disk partitions towards the bottom center of the screen. One of these will be your Western Digital disk, formatted for the Mac. (It'll likely say it's an HFS, Protected, or Unknown file system.) It will NOT say NTFS, FAT32, or have a drive letter, so be sure you're not choosing one of those disks instead. Right-click on this box, and left-click Format.
- I'd recommend formatting it to NTFS, and putting a checkmark next to 'Quick Format.' Then, when Finished, the computer will format it and assign it a drive letter automatically. You'll now be able to use the hard drive on Windows.
