Portable hard drive is full

I purchased a WD My Passport upon the recommendation of the sales person at Best Buy. I told him I did not want a backup system, I wanted a portable drive I could copy files, open directories, etc. In other words another data disk drive. I cannot copy files to it, I cannot open a folder, etc. When I look at the properties of the device it says it has no free space.

Have I been lied to by the sales person? Is there a way to override the automatic back up system it wants to install (SmartWare)?

Thank you for your time and attention to this.
Michael Dietz

 

Right-Click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage". On the left choose "Disk Management". Then find your drive in the list (make sure you have the right one, it should be down towards the bottom). When you have found the drive, right-click on the partition and choose "Delete". Then when it has deleted choose "New Partition". Follow the wizard, making sure that "Primary Partition" is selected instead of "Extended Partition" and make sure that the partition size matches the maximum disk size.

 

Thank you Collinsl and Halo.

However nothing worked. When I tried to delete the partition, the delete option in the menu box is grayed out and not accessible.

When I tried to format the device I get the error message that the drive is write protected and cannot be formatted.

Any more suggestions will be greatly appreciated as I am about to throw the damn thing through Best Buy's window.

Again thank you for your time and attention.
Mike

 

Whoops! I may have replied too soon.

I was trying to format drive H: as that was the drive indicated by Windows Explorer for the data on the device. I dug a little further and found that drive G: is apparently the actual data partition. So I tried to format drive g and at this point in time it is 4 percent done. So maybe I have fixed my problem. I will let you know.

Thanks again
Mike