Before you go that route, see if there's an easier way. It's
fairly likely
that the drive is already formatted as a FAT filesystem. Also, I presume
that by "external drive" you mean a USB drive.
I think these days it is more likely that it is formatted NTFS than FAT32.
FAT32 doesn't support very large volume AFAIK.
So I would suggest first finding out what it is currently formatted as. (You
can do this under linux or windows, but probably easier under windows if it
is NTFS as FC does not support this out the box. Under XP just plug it, right
click on the icon and check out its properties).
The other question is what do you want to do with this disk ? If you are going
to use it 100% ONLY under linux, and reformatting it as ext3 is probably a
good idea. If you wish to share it because OSes (linux, windows, MacOS) then
you will need to use a format all support.
ext3 : Native under linux, third party drivers exist for windows. Not native
in Mac OS (never really understood why..) but again I believe third party
packages exist
ntfs : native in windows, read support stable for linux. read/write for linux
available but rather new, so stability not so certain. I guess native in
MacOS ?
fat32 : generally works read/write everywhere, but unfortunately does really
support the big drives these days.
I recently went through this myself. Since I use linux most of the time, with
very occasional win XP, I choose to use ext3.
Chris