Formatting partition (external WD portable HD) with disk utility takes days

For the past five days I've been trying to get my new WD Elements portable HD to work with my new MacBook Pro. I am using Disk Utility to partition the HD (being 1 TB in size). However, this process is taking 3 days now and nothing seems to happen.
The progress bar in disk utility seems to be stuck halfway but the program itself is still active. When I stop the process (by quitting disk utility) nothing happens. The program shuts down but the HD is nog longer visible in both Mac OSX Lion and in Windows. It is still there as disk utility does list it in the connected drives list - but it simply doesn't format it.
At first I thought it was the disk itself so I got a new HD (and sent the old one back) but that hasn't solved the problem.
Obvious question is: what's going wrong and how can I fix it?

D3Rk wrote:
I did ask WD and they said it the drive was not functioning well. That's why I returned it to the store and got a new one. Since the same thing is happening again, I'm thinking it's not the drive but something else.
I'm using the partition tab in disk utility (as recommend by WD) to format the existing partition into a Mac (Journaled) partition.
So you did not choose any of the security options.
Well, they said first one was bad, this one is doing exactly the same thing, so it sounds like this one is bad. Think I'd get a refund instead of an exchange if that's an option.
You can also try it on a different machine, Mac or PC and see if it works. If it's a Mac, I'd hope for a SL or L install instead of Lion.

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