Time Machine Configuration of USB Backup Device - Device does not work

Hi there,
my issue is that it appears that I'm not able to successfully partition / initialize / format or whatever my external USB device (Trekstor Datastation 300GB NAS) to work with Time Machine.
Time Machine wants to prepare the drive which I accept and then it doesn't do anything for a long time (appears process hangs). After some time it will state that it failed or I manually kill the process as it hangs.
After that I can not use the drive anymore at all since partition table seems broken. After using fdisk on Linux I can get the drive working again by creating a FAT32 partition.
I also tried to use fdisk on OS X and I could get it partitioned with "fdisk -a device" but even after that Time Machine does not accept the drive.
All options like delete, partition, repair etc. using Disk Utility.app result in broken drive.
I also tried with another (standard non NAS) USB device, same issues.
I also tried booting from Install DVD and used that Disk Utility.app. Same result.
I tried many different combinations now and I'm really lost. Although I'm quite new to Mac OS X I have quite some experience with Linux and Windows and it's not the first drive I have to initialize.
Anybody has any good idea? Are there tools that help analyze the issue?
It appears that the app can remove the FAT32 partition and then it stops. Lights from USB device turn off. No working sound anymore on drive. Process gets listed as "not responding". Even after 30 min nothing happens anymore.
Thanks for any comment that might help out here.

So I finally sorted it out. After a couple of further attempts using OS X and different tools I started looking for a software which could do it using Linux. I haven't found anything. So I looked further for something using Windows.
Although I don't like it I have to admit that MacDrive 7 on Windows XP did it. It ran just perfect, done in 2 minutes and drive usable for Time Machine without any further issues. It worked even with the Trial Version and I really consider to buy it for any potential future need. I think the only disadvantage is that I have read that MacDrive can only format the entire drive, which I wanted to do anyway. However, some might want to have a separate FAT or NTFS partition on it, I think in that case this might not work.
However, if anyone should have the same issue try MacDrive 7 on XP.

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