partitioning and formatting external usb hd

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@solnet.ch>]

Excuse this probably very stupid question,
but before I shoot myself in my feets I'd rather ask...

I've got my first external usb hd and can mount it without problems as
/dev/sda1 on my Debian/Sarge machine (kernel 2.4.27-2-386). It's formatted
as vfat and I want to keep a small vfat partition but for the main part
putting ext3 or something on it.

As this is my first experience with this type of hardware I want to double
check on the list if I can do that using 'fdisk /dev/sda' and then 'mkfs.ext3'
just as on oldstile ide disks?

Thanks a lot for a quick answer,
Robert Epprecht