How to format large USB external drive to FAT32 for Ubuntu

Question

I am trying to help a friend back up some files to an external USB drive from a machine running Ubuntu. The drive is a 1.36 TB big and is using NTFS. From what I can tell I need to reformat it to FAT32. But FAT32 does not seem to be able handle a drive that big.

I tried mkfs -t vfat but it still shows as NTFS on the Ubuntu machine. Which is funny because when I plug it into my Windows 7 machine to format it there it shows up as FAT32. I also tried SwissKnife but it only offered me FAT16 - I want FAT32.

What can I do?

Answer 1

What happens when you manually re-mount the drive as vfat?

umount /MOUNTPOINT
mount -t vfat -v /dev/sdXX /MOUNTPOINT