Time Machine Dies on Mac mini with new, Mac-formatted USB HD

I purchased a new Western Digital 'My Book' 500GB USB external hard drive and connected it to a G4 Mac mini running the latest Leopard version. Right out of the box, I erased the external USB drive and reformatted it with Disk Utility to 'Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)'. The partition map is set to 'Apple Partition Map' with 'Read/Write' status...all looks good so far, right?
The moment the USB drive reformats, a Time Machine dialogue box pops open (this is good!) and asks if I want to use this new drive as my backup drive for Time Machine. I say "OK".
About a half hour later, Time Machine begins is first total backup of the Mac mini. After about 4 to 7 GB (it is different each time), Time Machine either quits or hangs up. When it quits, if you go to System Prefs>Time Machine, it shows that Time Machine has no backup drive to talk to. When it hangs up, you just see the spinning beach ball.
I have reformatted the drive a bunch of times, but have never gotten it to work. I read in the Apple help section (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306932) that I may have a Master Boot Record partition type, and will try that next.
Please let me know if you can help, and I will report back how the MBR partition cleanup goes.
Thanks,
STEVE

Pondini's site is excellent, but didn't happen to cover this problem (or Mavericks in particular as of yet). But I did call AppleCare support as you suggested, rkaufman87, where I was quickly escalated since I'd already tried the things the first tier support people start with. After some investigation via screen sharing and inspection of my system log (which suggested the stall involved issues with the index) the main change we made was to clear out the Time Machine preference files and Spotlight's cache before rebooting and trying again. This time the backup completed without stalling, and has continued to work ever since. Thanks for encouraging me to call support!

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