Need to Delete/Create Partion, when converting FAT32>NTFS

[paul48]

I bought a USB HD type Western Digital 250GB 'Passport' specifically to both securely backup including Disaster Recovery my internal HD, and to Archive many large videos so using all of the 250GB. It was imported from a shop in USA, and formatted as FAT32 which is useless for large video files. I emailed WD on best way of converting to NTFS, and as no response in 2 weeks, I phoned their Tech Support, who told me simply to Right click on Drive, then FORMAT, which was automatically NTFS, no other option.
I did that and started backing up.

LONG AFTER that, WD replied to my email, advising me to do essentially the same thing, BUT WITH THE ADDITIONAL STEP OF DELETING THE PARTITION AND RECREATING IT BEFORE FORMATTING ! I immediately replied to their email pointing out how it differed from their telephone advice, pointing out importance of backup integrity, and ASKING IF BACKUP INTEGRITY COMPROMISED BY OMITTING THE 'DELETE PARTITION' - 'CREATE PARTITION' STEP. No response. My Question is, (as the Passport is really just a generic external HD) for safety, does the above additional step make any difference to integrity ? (am bit reluctant to have to repeat the backups I have already made since their telephone advice, but will do it if it improves integrity).

[TazUk]

Shouldn't make any difference whether you delete and re-create the partition or not. You would only need to do that extra step if you wanted to change the type say from an extended partition to a primary partition, or vis versa.