hehe, no need to deride yourself that much, a simple "i'm thick" normally works


i presume you're wanting this drive under linux? just plug it in and format it to ext3 or at least fat32. NTFS support doesn't happen under linux, for various closed source reasons.
you've not said what distro you're using, so the basic effiecnt way to do it is...
conenct the drive up and load linux
use "fdisk -l" to list connected drives, find out which one out of hda/hdb/hdc/hdd the drive is connected to. you may well know already tho. next up you need to clear the whloe thing...
cfdisk /dev/hdX (X = a/b/c or d)
and remove all the old partitions, and then create a new linux one (type 81 in the list). once that's written, format it with.
mke2fs /dev/hdXY (Y = partition number)
OR if you're using a newer distro that supports ext3 (i.e. redhat 7.2, mandrake 8.1...) use
mke2fs -j /dev/hdXY
this version just adds an ext3 journal to the system, meaning it will recover better if it crashes etc...
after that just mount it somewhere and edit the samba config to get it shared.
should be all you need. maybe.