Formatting the hard drive

We still had the big Western Digital hard disk to format, so that the computer could use all that space.  It took a little investigation on the web to find out what to do, but once we did that, it wasn't too hard.  We went from the Windows Start button to the Control Panel, then to System and Security, then Administrative Tools, then double-clicked on Computer Management.  This opened a new program and in the left part of the screen, under Storage, we had to double-click again on Disk Management.  That's a lot of steps, but I guess it stops you accidentally formatting anything by accident!.  What we ended up with at this point was a map of all our disks, including the big space on the Western Digital drive.  We had to right-click on that to create what's called a new "volume".  We left all the default settings, except we changed the drive letter to "W" (for Western Digital) and changed the volume name to "Western Digital A".  Oh yes, and we unchecked the button that said "Quick format".  This meant that the formatting program checked every location on the disk to see if any were damaged.  Formatting this way takes a long time - about 3 hours for our 1.5 Terabyte drive! But we thought it was worth it since it was a brand-new drive and we wanted to make sure it was all OK.  We just went and did something else while it was doing its stuff.  And 3 hours later all was finished and Windows could see all that new space ready to use.