[fmbighair]

Thanks Dougfather,
I think I'm gonna do the Firewire too.

The external hard drive manual says I have to use "Apple Disk Utility" using one of the Mac OS format types before using it w/my Mac. I couldn't find Disk Utility anywhere, so I did a search in Help and just clicked on "open Disk Utility for me." I clicked on the external hard drive I want to format. There's four tabs, Information, First Aid, Erase, Partition and RAID. I assume I just click on the one that says "erase" and choose "Mac OS extended" for the "Vollume Format?"

thanks again.