alrighty. i erased the partitions for my 250 gb external hd and now want to format it. can someone help me here? its been a long time since i did this. thanks guys. your suggestions and help have been great thus far.

NTFS definitely. Actually NTFS is pretty much the only choice for 250 GB partition. AFAIK You can't format such a huge partitions with any other windows file system. Not with windows tools anyway.

Edit:
+ There is the famous 4 GB file size limit on FAT32

I use ext2 on my 250gb external hdd in Windows for compatibility reasons.

These days I hook up any drive as a slave, right click and format.