External Hard Drive formatting

[Harold Michels]

I have just purchased a 500GB Maxtor external USB HDD from Staples (On 
sale at $129.00 plus tax through today).

The Linux pages told me it would plug in and run out of the box. It 
does, sort of.
It is being reported by my system (Fedora Core 6) as having been 
formatted as NTFS.

I would like to set it up as half NTFS (so I can back up the wife's 
computer) and set the rest to the Linux file system (ext3 in this case).
I am presuming that the MS OS will prefer the first half of the drive to 
itself and so I want to partition the second half and format it as ext3. 
One of the messages that came up leads me to think it may have some type 
of boot sector formatted into the front end for NTFS.

man fdisk says that fdisk will only work on the smaller drives and I 
should use parted.
man parted on my system only talks about the ext2 file system.

The Linux Pimp
http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/main/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=561
suggests using the command *mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 *to put on a file system 
on an external device. This is premised on the drive being all one 
partition.

I wanted to use parted to determine how many sectors are on the 500GM 
disk so I could split them int two equal partitions. I used the print 
and check commands on the assumption that they would be  non destructive 
if I mangled something. I received an error message "Error: Can't have a 
partition outside the disk!" from each of them.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed or where to go to get 
a better understanding of this project?

Harold