I have a Western Digital My Book World Edition external harddisk with blue rings. I filled it up and now want to delete the data and start over. I'm set in my ways and have been accustom to reformatting harddisks periodically (sector maintainance, etc.) It's worked for me as I've luckily have not had a disk crash in 25 years.
My webapp is not helping me with the reformat and neither is Western Digital tech support. I've heard that it was factory formatted with something called Linux ext3. Does this make sense? Has anyone had any experience with reformatting external harddisks being used as a NAS (home use).

thanks in advance.
ccr

You could get it formatted with ext3 if you tools to do that. If you have got Linux installed, it would be easier for you to reformat it in ext3. Else you can get a Live distribution like Ubuntu and use it to format your drive. GParted tool would be the best suit for you.
And using it as NAS should not make too much difference anyhow. NAS is nothing but the shared storage connected to a system and shared by others.

Thank you for your help. I'll give that a try.

The WD My Book World Edition is a real NAS device i.e. its only connection is via ethernet. gparted will only work if the actual data drive is connected to the computer i.e via USB, IDE etc. I assume that the OS is strictly firmware and the drive is only for data. I'm not familiar with this particular device but if there is no drive setup via its web tool then can you connect to it via ssh or telnet? If so, then it might be possible to reformat. Your device might actually have two drives configured in a RAID array.

IMHO I do not think it is necessary to reformat but it should be possible.