hard drive partition problem

hi, i erased partitions from an older firewire drive only to find out that disk utility won't partition or erase it any more giving out this info: input/output error.
s.m.a.r.t is not supported on this drive and it has worked fine the last 2 years. do i need to seek out a more sophisticated program to solve this?
thanks for any responses.....

hey tomleep1,
i'm having the same problem, similiar problem on another drive was fixed by booting from the install/restore disk and then running disk utilities. Some posts suggest this maybe a bug in the OS so booting from the disk should sort out the problem...