Unable to format external drive as Mac OS Extended

I just bought a WD 3TB My Book Essential external hard drive so I can free-up space on my Mac Mini. When I used Disk Utility to erase the data and reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended, I got the following error:
+Disk Insertion+
+The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer+
There were three options; Initialize, Ignore or Eject. Choosing either Initialize or Ignore resulted in the following error:
+Disk Utility Internal Error+
+Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and relaunch Disk Utility+
So I Googled it and found the following thread http://discussions.info.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11461203
This suggested using First Aid; Repair Disk. When I ran this, I got the following error:
+First Aid failed+
+Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk4s1” because the following error was encountered:+
+Filesystem verify or repair failed+
I'm stuck; does anyone have any ideas how to resolve this?!

Not sure what the problem was on the MacMini (10.5.8), but I just managed to format the disk on my MacBook Pro (10.6.4).
Problem solved!

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