How to format WD Elements 1TB for Time Machine use

I tried using the second link, and got as far as this paragraph:

"On the Partition pane, everything will appear to be greyed out, as if you had encountered a brick wall. That's because before you can do anything, you have to change the partition arrangement, using the Volume Scheme pop-up menu. You have to do this even if you don't actually want to change the number of partitions. So, the Volume Scheme pop-up menu starts out saying Current. Change that. The minimal change is to 1 Partition. I'm not going to tell you that you need any more partitions than one, or how big they should be; that's up to you, and depends on how this disk will be used."

It says to change the Volume Scheme pop-up menu, but that menu is also greyed out and un-changeable. I am getting that brick wall feeling the author mentioned. How can I fix this?

I really appreciate the fast responses, thank you for your help so far 🙂

There is no indented volume, it only shows up as "500.11 GB WD Ext HDD 1021 Media," which is also kind of weird because it's a 1TB drive and it says 500GB. Any suggestions?

Pondini - I understand that I need to be able to format the drive in Disk Utility, however all of the options in the Erase and Partition menus (and all other disk utility options) are greyed out and uneditable.

bd - I followed steps in Option 2 and Terminal gave this message:

Started partitioning on disk1
Unmounting disk
Error: 13: POSIX reports: Permission denied

Okay thank you, I appreciate all the help. I think I will try to return it for one that is explicitly mac-friendly to avoid all this trouble.

Returned the drive for a WD My Passport and it works now. Thanks everyone.