When I made myself an external hard drive, I had to partition it in order for my system to recognize it, and it was assigned a letter (i.e. drive G). If I want to use this hard drive on my work computer, do I also have to partition it again? Basically, does the drive have to be partitioned on each computer I plug it into? thanks

 

No, assuming your work machine can read whatever filesystem you created.

 

mostly excel, word, some avi, etc.... do the other computers also randomly assign it a harddrive name?

 

the answer is no. Just like rtspood said.

 

you can actually assign whatever letter you want to your drive, so long as that letter is not already being used by another component.

 

nope, it should work just fine.

I have a seagate notebook drive partitioned using NTFS and i take it to work and back with no problems. Now if i wanted to hook it up to my home or works linux box i'd have to reformat it as fat.