Santa brought me a new Western Digital 1TB external hard drive for Christmas this year. So of course, the first thing I had to do was plug it in and reformat it from the default FAT32 filesystem to ext3. There are many obvious reasons for doing this, most importantly large file management and fragmentation issues.

So here's the steps I took. First, unwrapped it and plugged it in. Easy. Ubuntu recognized and mounted it. I then fired up gParted, which is available in most major distributions' package managers.