What external HD for bootable drive

Have tried to make a bootable hard drive using Disk Utility as advised by Apple Tech. Didn't work.
The external HD is a WD 1T that is a few years old and wouldn't let me change the size of the 2 partitions on it so that I could install the OS 10.3 from disc.
I wanted to use the smaller partition, but it was too small for the OS. So I tried to reduce the larger one in order to then increase the smaller one so that there would be enough for the System. If you can't read the image, the message is:
Partition failed
Partition failed with the error:
Could not modify partition map because filesystem varification failed
Do I need a special type of HD to do this?

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