Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Unable to partiton external HD

Macbook OS10.6.8

Today I bought a My Passport Essential Portable HD 500GB/Go
USB 3.0 +USB 2.0

Tonight,, after running Disk Utility and Disk Warrior I followed the reformatting instructions:
MyPAssport shows on the desktop > Disk Utility> selected Erase > HFS+ journalling was greyed out but format shows as Mac OS Extended [Journaled}
Owner enabled: NO
Number of folder: 9
Capacity: 500.07 GB
Available: 499.63GB
USED: 44.8 MACBOOK
Number of files: 40

So far so good, but no way can I see Partition/Format it GUID/Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with the iMac as I expected.

The MYPASSPORT folder on the desk top is empty - no options there.

I was hoping to back up my HD before addressing other problems with Mail, but am now stuck.
Help please?
Kate

If you are using the Erase tab, the GUID partition scheme is selected by default even though it may not say so. If you want to partition the drive, select the Partition tab, not Erase. That will give you more options. If the Partition tab is not visible, you must select the physical hard drive (the first icon) in the Disk Utility window, not any partitions (indented under the first icon).

I hope that this helps.

Welcome to FineTunedMac.

Thank you.
It has been years since I last set up an external HD - and does't it show.
If only the makers directions had been as clear as yours - many thanks, all is now well, and the backup complete.
Kate