Have you ever tried to format a drive using Apple’s Drive Utility program and found that it just would not work?  You’ve probably done this a hundred times before, it should work.  Arrrgh!  You don’t care about saving any data, you don’t care about anything other then just formatting that dumb drive.  Well unless you have a drive with a mechanical issue the problem is likely with the partition table.  Very often a program such as Drive Utility will not overwrite a partitioning table unless you specifically tell it to.  This comes up when you try to format a FAT32 drive as an HFS+ drive for example.  The real confusion lies in the program just quitting and acting stupid instead of telling you what the problem is (are you listening Apple?).  Fortunately the solution is very simple, just follow the outline below and chances are you will see your new partition pop up on your desktop in a few minutes.