I feel retarded, but I cannot figure this out. I am trying to get the gparted live cd up and running to reformat my 300GB Western Digital II USB with ext3, but I can't even boot into the CD. Every time I try, I boot into grub and nothing more. I'm stuck! What now?

I'm useless!

I haven't tried to use the gparted live cd. I know that the System Rescue CD has a bunch of utilities including gparted. This Linux live CD has been very useful to me.

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

Of course you really don't need to do that if you already have Linux running. You could just plug the USB disk in and use mkfs to write over the existing file system. If the USB disk shows up as /dev/sda there is already a Microsoft file system on it. That partition is called /dev/sda1. The following command would overwrite the existing file system with the ext3 file system.
If you want to do it right you could take the extra step to make the disk partition table show that the partition is a Linux partition. To do this you use cfdisk to change the type of partition from FAT32 to Linux.
You just select [Type] and then enter the number 83. Then you select [Write]. Then [Quit]

Well, I got the thing formatted by just using a different computer (turns out that the boot CD didn't want to boot on a USB cd-drive....others have but grub is picky). Now I have a new issue: Only one folder exists on the drive, one named "Lost+Found" and nothing can be written anywhere else. Oye, veh is mere! I guess I should post another thread now. Thank you, though stress_junkie, you have been both immensely helpful and educational. Thank you.