Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB

Just bought this USB-HDD. But at home, I discover that I only have 465 GB available. And the back of the cardboard box says:

"What does it do? Your FreeAgent Pro data mover comes with sowftware that lets you automatically duplicate content to your flash drive, email and contacts to your iPod, photos to a Shutterfly account, or your entire My Documents folder to your FreeAgent Pro. You can also move content to your own online space*, access it from any browser and share it with anyone.

* 500 MB [sic!] Seagate Internet Drive subscription free for 6 months. Subscription fees apply thereafter. More capacity available for additional cost."

Of course I have nothing against Seagate, otherwise I would buy another drive. But I wont register for just a HDD. But can I format the drive so that I have access to all available disc-space?

Plug in the HDD and see what XP's disk manager sees for its partitions.  If it's all 1 partition then you simply have to unhide files and folders and delete them.  If not, then you might have to remove the partitions first.

Formatting the drive, however, might require special software.  Consult the drive documentation to be sure.  Hopefully you can just format it like any other drive, after partition simplification.