[HM] Trying to initialize an external drive

[Jane Sprando]

I bought a LaCie external firewire drive. I set up the drive and needed to
format it with Disk Utility. The icon for LaCie was visible on my desktop.

I am running 10.2.8. I opened Disk utility, but couldn't find where to
initialize the drive. So I thought maybe partitioning/Current might do the
trick. I gave the drive a name and hit partition. Now the drive doesn't show
up at all and I get a message that I need to initialize it.

So..... What am I doing wrong? This should be so easy and I feel dumb! I
went to Apple support, but it doesn't tell me how to initialize!

Jane