new external harddrive

I bought an external harddrive recently for backing up data. It is Iomega 320 GB, very light and easy to carry. Then I tried to connect it to my linux machine and it does not appear ! even I used the
fdisk -l
for checking the disks with the computer system and it is not there.

Then I realised that perhaps it is the problem of format ! I look at the manual of the harddrive it only notes the usage for windows and mac. I tried to connect it to a windows machine and it is found ! So the only solution is to format this disk to FAT32 for linux (also readable for windows).

a few notes:
Linux refers to hard drives as either "hdx" or "sdx," where x is a letter, starting with a, which represents the order in which the drive was added to or detected by the computer. The "hd" prefix is used for IDE and PATA (formerly just ATA), and the "sd" prefix is used for SCSI, SATA and USB drives. Usually, a number is also put at the end of "hdx" or "sdx" to denote different partitions on the same physical drive, but for the purpose of formatting, you only need to know which letter the drive you want to format is.

we can see all the drives attached to a system by typing the command "ls /dev/hd*" or "ls /dev/sd*", depending on which type (IDE, SATA and so forth) the drives are. On the example system, the result of this command looks like "/dev/hda /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb /dev/hdb1". The operating system is installed on hda, which has two partitions (hda1 and hda2), and there is one partition on hdb and hdb1.

The easiest way for partition and format is to use the GParted or PartedMagic software . Otherwise we can use the commandline such as fdisk and mkfs.

Attention: formatting will remove all the data from the disk !