Formatting an external USB drive using FAT32

I have an external USB enclosure with a 500G drive in it. Under linux, I figure out what name it is getting assigned by doing tail -f /var/log/messages when I plug in the USB cable. It turns out to be assigned /dev/sda (usually).

The drill then is to use fdisk to delete all existing patitions, then create one big one that fills the whole disk, give it type 0xb and mark it active. It goes like this:

fdisk /dev/sda
--delete all partitions
p - show what the current partition table is
n p 1 (make a new patition, primary, partition 1)
t b (give it type "b" for FAT32)
a 1 (make it active)
w
q

mkdosfs -F32 /dev/sda1