External HD - rookie question

I just bought a Seagate 250G External HD to back up photos of my daughter....will be backing them up on CD as well. Anyway, the Seagate needs to be reformatted for MAC. I know that this is done thru Disk Utility but am not sure of the steps after that (ie, which tab and which MAC option to choose - journalled, extended, etc.). If anyone would be willing to share the steps to reformat, I would really appreciate it.

BTW, I have the MacBook Pro w/ Leopard if that makes a difference.

open disk utility select the disk you want to format.

from there select the tab marked "erase"

you will then have two options "Volume Format" and "name" if you want to use the drive on both windows and mac OS select MS-DOS (FAT). The "Mac" formats are specific to machines running Mac OS.

under the "security options" button select how many passes you want to do. Zero out data in your case should be fine. All that is left to do is click erase.

Many thanks and Happy New Year to you!!!