Disk Utility - problems formatting a disk

Question

I recently purchased a Western Digital 1 Terabyte "My Book" and started having problems dumping video onto it from Final Cut. On the FCP forum somebody pointed out that I need to make sure my drive was formatted for the Mac (it wasn't).
I didn't have much data on the drive, so I just dumped it elsewhere and tried to reformat the drive to Max OS Extended (Jounaled). I think I've messed things up because I didn't know the difference between the Drive image and the Partition image. I think reformatted the Partition image (instead of the Drive image) to Mac OS and this seems to have messed things up. The Drive won't mount.
At this point the partition is formatted for Mac OS, but the drive is formatted for MS-DOS. Now I'm stuck and can't seem to fix this. When I have Disk Utility format the drive to Mac OS I get a message that says "File System Formatter Failed."
I've tried reformatting the Volume to MS-DOS to see if I can start from square one, and then my Mac can see the Drive. However, if I go back to the Drive and try to change it to Mac OS, it freaks out and sets the drive to MS-DOS and the partition to Mac OS.
I can't seem to get out of this loop. I would like to have just one partition and have everything formatted to Mac OS.
Help?

Answer 1

Do this:
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
This will format the drive for OS X. Using the APM partition scheme will not allow you to create a second partition on the drive and format that partition as MSDOS. If you want to use the drive on both platforms, then you must partition the drive using MBR and format using MSDOS. This allows the drive to be used on both platforms.