How do I format a Seagate 500 to work on a Mac?

I bought one of the Seagate FreeAgent 500 devices yesterday and followed the instructions on the back of the box: plug it in; let the Mac recognize it; go to the Disk Utility function (found in Applications > Utilities); select the Erase tab and check the box to re-format the FreeAgent to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and choose a name for it.  Then proceed with the re-formatting.  It took only a few minutes but as soon as it was done, Time Machine (Leopard) kicked in and asked if I wanted it as my backup drive.  I said yes, and away it went.  Hope this helps.  By NewbieMacUserSept2007

-Navigate to the computer's hard drive, then to the applications folder, then utilities, then disk utility. -Once in disk utility navigate to the partition tab and click it. -On the left on the window, under volume scheme, click the tab that says current, and slide down to select 1 partition. -Then click on the options tab below the partition window(before changing the partition, this button is not clickable). -Once you are there you will see the partition scheme that the drive defaults to which is called Master Boot Record. -A Mac user running a computer at 10.4 or higher should select GUID Partition table. -All others should select the Apple Partition Map. -After the proper selection is made, just click apply. -After all this is done, then you can navigate to the erase tab in the Disk Utility, but I am pretty sure you shouldn't need to.  It should be good to go! Hope this helps.

I can't actually solve it but I've run into problems like this before where you need to somehow create a partition that is the correct capable size. Something about the bit number of the partition being a multiple of Four. Out of the box some are sizes that are not the right multiple. Just a thought.

Dahsinapu's solution worked (after nothing else did). In Disk Utilty, instead of formatting the drive, choose a single partition, set to GUID (under options), and apply. :)

As a combination of solutions #2 and #3, I had to partition my Seagate in two partitions to get it to format properly and avoid the problem of the multiple of four. Not sure if another way wouldn't have worked, but the partitioning works for how I use it, anyway.