Help with repartitioning an external hard drive

I am sorry that this is probably such a simple question, but I am a novice and I am stumped in Northern Thailand.
I have an external hard drive (500g) that I have partitioned way back into 3 - one for my IMac 1 for a Macbook Pro and the other for a MacBook.
The hard drive is always connected via USB to the IMac and only connected with the laptops on oonce in a while.
Anyway my problem is that I am getting a message on my IMac everytime TM tries to backup that there is not enough room - so i wanted to repartition the hard drive since I have allocated too much to the laptops. When I am in the TM preferences and I go to "Change Disk" and click on "Set up Time Capsule" it defaults to the AirPort Utility and looks for an "Apple Wireless Device", of course my external hard drive is not on of them - so I am stuck.
If you do not want to waste the time of others on this discussion board you could email directly.
Thanks in advance
<Edited by Host>

if the drive is connected directly to the imac you have to reformat it using disk utility, not airport utility.
to format a drive you open disk utility. select the whole drive (model, not name) and click on the partition tab. set the number of partitions to 1 (or whatever), click on options and set the partition scheme to GUID. set the format to mac os extended journaled (that's the default) and click "apply". note that this operation will completely wipe the drive. is this acceptable? depending on how your partitions are set up you may be able to delete one partition and increase the TM partition without erasing the data on the TM partition.

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