Hi jdc2000,

I appreciate you and DVOM helping me out here. Although it's new to me and a little confusing, it's a good learning process.

OK, to clear up my last post, here's what the manual says that came with the External drive:

"Your Western Digital USB 2.0 external hard drive is preformatted as one FAT32 partition and is now ready to use"

To partition and reformat the drive: FAT32 partitions created by the utilities included in Windows 2000/XP have a partition size limitation of up to 32 GB. To create partitions greater than 32GB, you will need to reformat the drive using the NTFS file system." (Note: I want it to be NTFS since both my desktop and notebook internal drives are NTFS)

I think the following has probably contributed to my confusion: In P. Magic, the only option enabled for the external drive is "Create". The option to Delete the drive is greyed out. However, when I go into XP's Disk Management, the option to Delete the drive is enabled.

So based on that information, is this what I need to do?
1)delete the existing FAT32 partition using XP's Disk Mgmt
2)reformat and convert to NTFS using P. Magic (formatting in Disk Mgmt failed, per my post above)
3) then do my partitioning using P. Magic

Appreciate the guidance, I'd hate to fry a $200 drive!
Thanks -Kat