Formating a disk (disk utility isnt working) any alternatives?

For some reason, Disk Utility is crashing every time i try to open it. I Have a hard drive that i used on an old computer for time machine and want to reformat it to clean it out, is there any other alternatives for formatting drives?

I would try and figure out why disk utility is crashing first

Try using MainMenu and run all its clean-up - and repair permissions

If that still fails are you using 10.5.3?

If not do it from terminal

ls Volumes - Lists all the volumes connected to your mac

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ newdisk disk1 - where newdisk is the name of the new drive and disk1 is the name of the drive to be formatted