formating 120gb external hard drive to ext2 is it possible?
 

I was wondering if it was possible to use the fdisk command and delete the ntfs partiton i currently have on my external 120gb hard drive and replace with a new one or maybe more than one maybe a few using the ext2 filesystem?

Also can this cause my system to lock up when i use the mke2fs command?

I'm assuming you have this external hardrive unmounted. if it mounted umount it now. find the location of your external drive: e.g: /dev/hdx. now run mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdbx and you'll be fine.

hope this helps,
Mr. Piratero

Well what about using multiple partitions would it really matter seeing how i want to use it for just a back-drive?

use cfdisk.