formating external USB hard drive

[François Patte]

Bonjour,

I have a USB hard drive and 3 questions:

1- I suppose that this hd is dos-formatted by default. Is it because 
this that I had a problem of file size limitation? I couldn't create a 
file more than 4.2Gb.

2- Is the problem will be the same with an ext3 file system, and will 
udev/hotplug/hal recognize and automatically mount the device if I 
format it with mkfs.ext3?

3- How to format the external hd, for it has to unmounted before being 
formated?

Thanks for help.
-- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Université René Descartes
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte