How to partition an external harddrive

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premiun (upgraded from Windows 7 Starter) on an Acer Aspire One Netbook and want to partitiion a 1TB external harddrive.  I am the Administrator but the 'expand' option is greyed out in the disk management tool and
I am unable to partition the drive.  Is there something I need to do besides format the drive?  I'm used to Windows XP and never had difficulty partitioning a drive before.
I'm not a computer tech so reading Microsoft technical stuff doesn't help.  Can I get some layman's language to help me partitiion this drive?
Thanks in advance.  L. Cooper

I assume the 1TB drive is empty as in no data and stuff? And you're trying to create a partition? Do the following>>
Go to Control Panel>System and Security>Administrative Tools and then double-clicking Computer Management. 
In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.
Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume.
In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next.
Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next.
Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the partition, and then click Next.
In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following:
If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next.
To format the volume with the default settings, click Next.
Review your choices, and then click Finish.

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    Message was edited by: jsd2

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