use partition magic to format it fat32. that will give you the best option for using a large drive on mac and pc. partition magic or anything that knows how to format a large drive with fat32 (winxp, macos disk utilities will not allow you to do this).

i personally use windows 98 to format my large external drives to fat32.

use Disk Utility (inyour utilies folder in your application folder). Once in that program slect to erace the Harddrive and make sure to select what format you want it to be in once its done. (select Mac OS Extended (Jounaled)). then nae the HD.... after that is done hit the erase button... Just remeber.. You have to erase the HD to switch it over to anything.. so if you have important stuff on it.. you will need toback it up to another drive so you can reimport it to the newly formatted one.

NAME not nae

Well, if you plan on using the external on Macs and PCs, then you should format FAT32 as mentioned. If you plan on using it on Macs only then format to Mac's format, HFS I believe it called.

You should be able to do it in Disk Utilites. I formatted my ext drive to FAT32 on my Macbook using Disk Utilities, so I don't know what a-swift's talking about. I beleive it's MS-DOS format you want to select.

i ran into problems when formating LARGE external drives using mac's disk utility. try it, if it works great if not, then you'll know what i'm talking about. the program definitely has a size limitation for creating fat32 filesystems.

it's cool, I actually had a 40 gb partition that was fat 32 and a 190+gb partition that was ntfs..so all i did was go into the partition tab in disk utility and partitioned it to mac os extended, it erased both volumes but the ntfs volume was changed to mac os extended, and the fat 32 volume is the same format...so far it looks like everything is going ok, thanks for the help and suggestions guys, i'll be back if i run into problems :)

To format a specific partition on mac you can follow the steps here.
www.partitionmagicmac.org