External Hard Drive Help

[sunroot]

I rarely ask for help in forums because I'm the type of the guy who must solve problems immediately.  Unfortunately, I'm slightly ignorant with computers.  So I would like some help and along the way I'd like to be more educated about the stuff I use in my daily life.  I'll try to be as specific as possible.

I just bought a 750GB WD My Passport Essential SE external Hard drive.  It is my first time using an external hard drive and i mainly just stick with flash drives.  They're simple and small and do the job. 

Anyway, the main reasons I bought a new hard drive is because I would like to be able to watch movies/shows on my Xbox 360 using my external hard drive.

So when I put the hard drive in, it gives me all this trouble about downloading this software (apparently it comes with a software called WDSmartware) and makes me set up a password and started automatically backing up my entire computer.  I started to regret the purchase because I'm just a simple guy who just wants to store files and watch movies.  These extra features are completely unnecessary.

After going through the hassle of setting that up, I find out that my Xbox 360 can't even read the *censored* thing and I scour through the interwebs looking for an answer.. What i came upon (i don't know how much is true) is that i guess i need to reformat the external hard drive from NTSF to FAT32.  I scour the interwebs once more and come across two options.  MSDOS and this free software SwissKnife.

After a painful 2-3 hours of waiting for MSDOS to finish converting.. That's when the %$*$ tells me that my hard drive is too big to be converted so i go to option 2..

I don't know what happens (it's late and i'm tired) so i'll just make it simple

1. i deleted the primary partition
2. I created another partition with File System (Fat32)

and not even a minute passes by and it's finished converting. 
Considering my bad luck with technology, I know it seems too good to be true so i check the hard drive and guess what?
Now i only have 200gb of space.
I tried converting it back to NTSF and it still gives me 200gb of space

So here are my questions:
1. What have i done?
2.  What are partitions?
3. Did i permanently reduce my hard drive into 200GB worth of space?
4.  What SHOULD i do?

thank you for your help in advance.. I'll go to sleep now..

edit:
oh and because i formatted it or deleted the primary partitions.. the programs and driver software that came with the external hard drive are deleted.. =(

[DaveLembke]

You should be able to delete the partitions on that drive. Then create 2 partitions on it. The primary partition I would set up with FAT32. And the second partition I would set up as NTFS.

Custom Size your partitions - Create the FAT32 partition to that of the minimum you can live with, as for the FAT32 is wasteful in cluster space it takes up on the platters. The lesser the FAT32 partition the greater your NTFS secondary partition size will be since NTFS packs the data on the platters in smaller 64-bit clusters, less wasteful than FAT32.

As far as the software that you deleted, you should be able to reaquire it from western digitals website under support and downloads.

http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/answer/Efficiency-of-FAT32-versus-NTFS

[Geek-9pm]

This tropic  is now over 30 days old. 

If the OP is still around, did he find a solution to this? Others have had problems like that with some external drives. It would be interesting to know what the OP finally did.

 Looking back, it would have been better to just get a refund on the drive. But likely too late now. Unless he was able to get a good warranty or refund arrangement with the vendor. Some vendors might allow exchange for a similar drive.

Just curious.

[jlomas]

I don't know did you find a solution but I recommend you to contact WD support.

[koko12345]

I want to know if your problem solved??I come cross the same problem....

[mroilfield]

Looking back, it would have been better to just get a refund on the drive. But likely too late now. Unless he was able to get a good warranty or refund arrangement with the vendor. Some vendors might allow exchange for a similar drive.

It would have been better to read the documentation that come with the drive before messing around with it. I believe this is a major cause of most problems as people are either in too big of a hurry or think they know what they are doing instead of checking with the documentation first.

[Geek-9pm]

It would have been better to read the documentation that come with the drive before messing around with it. I believe this is a major cause of most problems as people are either in too big of a hurry or think they know what they are doing instead of checking with the documentation first.

Exactly! Worth repeating.