Stilly -

Most of the information I have from Microsoft is rather old, and refers mostly to Win2K and earlier, and to early WinXP.

A caution appears in several of them indicating that attempting to use WinXP alone to format large disks may cause you to lose access to much of the drive space - and these articles make reference to "hard drives over 2 GB" as being "large." And quick searches now still refer to the same dated articles.

It appears that WinXP can convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS, and it's safe to do the conversion with files on the disk, since it is not a format - it largely just rewrites the root index tables, and in NTFS they're "movable" so they can be fitted in with existing files.

Article 307881: How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP.

From an operating standpoint, there's no good reason to partition an NTFS drive. If you need to separate programs and data you can just make a Data folder and put the stuff that needs to be kept separate there, and it's easy enough to map the Data folder in Win Explorer so that it looks like a separate drive/partition if you like to think that way.

If you really need to do a fresh format, especially on a large hard drive, I'd recommend that you check with WD first, and see if the have a drive setup utility - that you can find. I'm sure they have the utility, and that it's available. It's the finding it that may be problematic. I've used Seagate's utility a couple of times recently, since that's what my drives were that needed some setup, and theirs seems to be in a different place every time I look for it. WD may be better, or worse.

WinXP has a fairly robust "Disk Management" plugin in the Management Console in XP Pro, but I'm not sure that any of the MMC is in XP Home(?), and/or whether Disk Management is present in self-standing form in Home. I've looked, quite a while back, and Microsoft doesn't seem to want Home users to know what's missing.

John