Formatting 1 TB External HD for Time Machine

Hi all -
This is my first post here. I just got a 1 TB Western Digital My Book Essential Edition external hard drive and now I'm formatting it. At least, I think I am. I'm not sure I'm doing it right. In Disk Utility it says "newfs_hfs: /dev/partition size not a multiple of 4k and the progress bar keeps moving along, but I can't tell if anything is actually happening. It also says the drive isn't mounted although I have it plugged into a USB port.
Please help me to understand what I'm doing, if I'm doing anything wrong, and if I am, how I can do it right. I bought this for the express purpose of backing up my entire system with Time Machine and I will be EXTREMELY upset if I've messed things up right from the start.
Thanks in advance for any and all helpful responses.
-- Jeff

I'm having the same problem with the 1TB WD My Book external HD on my MacBookPro running Leopard. The HD appears to come pre-formatted in FAT32, but I can't find any useful operations in Disk Utility to format it. There is no Partition tab. The drive appears to be verified as OK in FAT32 format, but Time Machine wants to reformat it ... when it tries, it fails immediately, leaving the drive name changed from MY BOOK to disk1s1. The erase tab is the only one which seems relevant, but if I try to set the format to Mac OS extended (journaled) as I understand it should be, it fails again, immediately, leaving an unreadable drive, which I have to erase again, setting it to FAT32, whereupon I;m back to square 1. Disk Utility seems a very lightweight utility, and I;m wondering if it ids properly installed, because this is really poor. I had the same problem with my Maxtor 500Gb external drive, which is why I bought the WD drive - solely for Time Machine, but I'm really struggling on this issue. I'm a new-to-mac user, btw. Can anyone help me - probably more step-by-step than you're used to! Thanks

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