Disk Utility Erase vs Partition to reformat

[crashlander]

I want to reformat my new My Book external, which came in Fat32. I'm new to the Mac, so this may be a silly question. Using Disk Utility, Erase seems to reformat the drive to HFS without Partitioning. Partition also reformats the drive.

Are they the same thing or is one better than another to reformat from Fat32? I only want 1 partition for time machine. Thanks

Thanks
Jeff

 

[r88my]

If you don't need to partition the drive just choose erase then select the file system you want it to be (i.e mac os journaled or whatever) and it will be just one partition. The partition bit is if you want to partition the drive into 2 or more partitions and you can individually select what file system you want each partition to be (partitioning also erases the drive). No difference as far as i'm aware between the two other than the actual partitioning. Hope this helps. Bear in mind i'm not a long time mac user so maybe someone else can clear this up.