Format Hard Drive in Single User Mode

If Disk Utility is having issues seeing the drive when booted from the DVD, there may be actual physical damage on the drive and it should be replaced.

Regardless, instructions and examples for formatting a drive via command line can be found here:

http://www.hmug.org/man/8/diskutil.php

John,

Disk Utility is also available at the command line. Open Terminal and type:

<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">man diskutil</pre>

then press <RETURN> to view the man pages. I suggest that you give those man pages a good read, then come back here if you have further questions. If you cannot get to the man pages (if you don't have a working installation of OS X), I could give you a specific command to run, but I'll need to know absolutely everything about what results you want (just "repartition" is WAY too vague).

Also, you might want to give Disk Utility another try, and give it plenty of time to handle the broken file system. Sometimes, a broken file system will become available for formatting, but only after an extended period of time (several minutes to an hour).

Scott