"Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and relaunch Disk Utility." Trying to format my iomega external HD for use with Mac

Question

Hi. Trying to connect iomega ext. HD. i have to reformat for Mac. When i plug in & go to Disk Utility,the external shows up and i'm supposed to click "partition". When i do, a box comes up saying ""Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and relaunch Disk Utility." I quit and relaunched, same results. After googling my question, i came up with this:
"Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and relaunch Disk Utility."
(Quitting and reopening Disk Utility does not help.)
The following also appears in Console log:
*** malloc[419]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x290a410; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug : for architecture i386 object: ./Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes malformed object (unknown flavor for flavor number 0 in LC_UNIXTHREAD command 27 can't byte swap it)
Workaround
Quit Disk Utility.
From the Finder's Go menu, choose Go to Folder....
Type the following, then click OK: /Library/Receipts
Temporarily remove these iTunes receipts from /Library/Receipts (sort the folder alphabetically as a list):
iTunes.pkg
iTunes4.pkg
You can put them on the desktop, for example. Do not remove iTunesX.pkg or iTunes Phone Driver.pkg.
Open Disk Utility and repair disk permissions again.
Quit Disk Utility.
Put the removed iTunes receipts back in /Library/Receipts.
Note: This issue does not affect Disk Utility's verify or repair disk features.
All seemed good, for a moment, until, upon going back to Disk Utility after removing itunes4.pkg and putting on desktop (i did not have itunes.pkg to remove) the same thing was happening. When i highlite my iomega ext. on left of page, disk perrmissions is grayed and does not allow me to click on it. Same problem from the start. Can somebody please help me out here? That would soooo awesome. Thanx!

Answer 1

i'm just scared i will do something wrong on my own and lose my data.
You shouldn't be scared of that, because you should already have backups. If you don't have backups, then backing up is the first priority.
Insert the Snow Leopard DVD and restart. When you hear the chime, hold down the C key and keep holding it until the Apple logo appears on the display. You should now see the language selection screen. Select your language, then choose Utilities > Disk Utility from the menu bar. In the Disk Utility window, select the external drive (not the internal). The drive may already have a data partition, in which case there will be another icon below the drive icon. Choose the drive icon, then select the Partition tab. Create a single partition with the default options (GUID partition table, Mac OS X Extended Journaled).
When the partitioning is done, select the startup volume on your internal drive in the DU window. Select the Restore tab. Drag the icon of the startup volume to the "Source" field. Then drag the icon of the newly-created volume on the external drive to the "Destination" field. Make sure you have this right. Then click the Restore button, and the data on your startup volume will be copied to the external drive.