External drive re formatting....different issue!

i want to reformat an external hard drive recently bought to use with a mac....its an iomega prestige 320gb...the instructions are clear enough, i could do with advice though....
i have used it once with a pc to put some some music files on it...how can i erase the music files as they are no longer needed....i don't really want any partitions......just for macs...
i have connected the hd to my imac...it shows in Disk Utility as an orange hd with a usb on...
its in the left hand column twice as:
the orange icon plus 298.1 GB ST932032 5AS M....
below it is an indent then the orange icon plus disk1s1
i have been told to click in the left hand column on the orange drive icon, not the volume icon....since the next step is select the partition tab and the partition tab only shows in the longer (and former) of the 2 entries i click on that....is that right?
select the partition tab..yes...
select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format drop down menu..
i can't select from this menu...but the above option i want is already there...what does this mean?
click on the options button..can't do this....
if i select a volume scheme other than "current" eg 1 partition then options and format become available.....but i dont want a partition...
...there's a bit more ...but that's a start!
thanks
ps the drive ships as NTFS formatted and the instructions for mac are to reformat the drive..
Message was edited by: David Barker7
Message was edited by: David Barker7

You should use +Mac OS Extended (Journaled)+ as the format type, no matter what you select as the +partition map scheme+. Format and +partition map scheme+ are two separate settings.
I can see how that wording may be confusing. What it is really saying is that
GUID Partition Table - This option is preferred if your Mac is Intel. However, you can use the disk on a PowerPC Mac, as long as it runs Mac OS X 10.4 or later AND that PowerPC Mac does not need to boot from the disk. To be bootable on a PowerPC Mac, the disk must use Apple Partition Map.
Apple Partition Map - This option is preferred if your Mac is PowerPC. However, you can use this disk on an Intel Mac. An Intel Mac can can even boot from the disk (but the Installer will only install Mac OS X on a disk that uses GUID Partition Table).
Master Boot Record - Use this option only if you need to use the disk on both Mac OS X and Windows computers.
Not sure if that is actually more clear or not. I'm sure Apple spent more time on the wording that I just did. The bottom line is, either GUID Partition Table or Apple Partition Map will be fine if the drive is just used for storage. Apple Partition Map may be the better choice, because you may want to make the external drive bootable later on (and there is no downside to using Apple Partition Map on a PowerPC Mac). In either case, the format type needs to be +Mac OS Extended (Journaled)+.

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Message was edited by: Katrina S.

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