Delete Volume instead of Delete Partition?

[Karpl]

My mom has a new Western Digital MyBook Essential external hard drive. We're just trying to convert it from FAT32 to NTFS in Vista. WD's instructions tell you to start by going to Disk Management, right-click on the drive and select "Delete Partition", then continue... This worked when I did it on mine in XP. With hers, she gets "Delete Volume" instead. Do you think it would be safe to just go ahead with that? After pestering WD for a month with emails, they finally answered:

"I apologize but I am unable to help you because this is an operating system issue that is outside the range of Western Digital?s standard support. Please contact Microsoft for assistance."

There's nothing important on the drive yet that she would need to save. So should we just go for it? Her main system is an HP Pavilion Media Center m7790y with Vista preinstalled.

Thanks for any suggestions!
-Karpl

 

[skreet]

Volume is a logical addressing of a Partition. If the 'volume' is just that one 'partition' then Delete Volume will only delete that partition. I would go ahead and delete it, you can't do any harm if you have no data to back up.

 

[Karpl]

Thanks. That makes more sense now. For some reason, I thought a volume represented the entire drive. Either way, it's hard to see what damage could be done on a new drive. I just wanted to be really sure since it's not mine.