Can't Format HD as Mac OS X Extended

I have a 60GB Toshiba drive that was an OEM Apple drive in my son's Macbook. I just upgraded his internal drive to a WD 320GB so I put the old drive in an external case to use as a portable drive. The drive worked fine in the Macbook. I want to wipe the drive and set a new, fresh partition but the drive won't format as Mac OS X Extended. The case I have is listed as a Mac compatible case altho I doubt that really matters.

Disk Utility will format the drive as a Master Boot Record and FAT32 or as a Apple Partition Map and Free Space drive but not a Mac OS X Extended. I even tried using Drive Genius but I get error messages saying the formatter failed.

Any idea what is going on?

Thanks.


David