reformat external drive

I have a WesternDigital Essentials external drive, previously attached to a desktop running under Vista. Now I wish to attach it to my new desktop running Win8 (not 8.1).

Before doing so, however, I want to check it for any incipient fault (because I'm slightly suspicious) then do a complete reformat (and partition?) of the drive.

Westerndigital includes proprietary software, the sole benefit of which seems to be to provide password protection of the drive. I'd prefer to get rid of all that and start with a virgin disk drive, which I'll use purely for backup purposes.

Would anyone be able to advise me of the steps needed, please, bearing in mind that I'm new to Win8.

Thanks.

http://wikihow.com/Format-an-External-Hard-Drive

Thanks for that link. Will now try it.

I'll respectfully suggest a better way: Go into diskpart and run the "clean" command AGAINST THE EXTERNAL DRIVE (google how to use diskpart if you are unfamiliar), this will ensure that the entire partition table is wiped first and then you can recreate a partition and then format.

Thanks aep. I've now tried it.

The way wd sets up, there are two partitions on the mybook essentials external drive, under two different drive letters, one containing the wd app and the other the stored data. You have to log in via the former in order to get into the latter. I found that I could use that software you mentioned to clear the data by re-formatting, but there has been no way I could get rid of the wd stuff.

I see that over time there has been some criticism of wd, and I'd have liked to get rid of their software. Guess I'll try what pipexer put forward.

Cheers