I have attached an external 20GIG seagate HD to one of the firewire ports on my G4. To begin with it said can't inidialize this drive. There is no drive setup in utilities , so I used the disk utility in OSX foler. there is no initialize,format so I went to partition. There is a tick to install OS9 with some info. So as I don't have an OS9 intall disk I unticked it Clicked lock for editing, installed disk 1 of 10.3 and went to partition. At the top of the partition part there was name untiteled which I changed to OSX. When I open this it is blank. I am a begginer with external HD's so help would be appreciatred.

Some external casings aren't compatible with Mac. You should check if yours is.

First I set zero's to the whole drive using Disk utlity and then went into partition, partitioned one segment, had to add a name to the segment, MacOSX_2 and when looking at that among other things it said format HFS+ I couldn't add anything else, so using cocktail changed the start up from a rotating circle to an apple program text where it says Boot volume read-only. It also detected the firewire HD and detected it wasn't bootable or something ending with error. There probably is a way of changing things in this program utility so could someone tell me how to proceed please.