/dev/sdb1 976760032 97808 976662224 1% /mnt/usbdrive
I am thinking of having three partitions instead of just one whole big 1 TB thing, and then format all three partitions in ext3. I tried doing fdisk, but cylinders are always confusing for me. Is there any GUI tool that could help me achieve this as I am newbie to Linux and not very confident with commands. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Don't be afraid of fdisk, it's really an easy tool to use. From your output above it's quite apparent that your USB drive is located at /dev/sdb. First unmount your drive (umount /dev/sdb1) and then run this command as root:
fdisk /dev/sdb
Then hit "d" to blow away that big vfat partition. Then you hit "n" to create a new partition. You don't have to know anything about cylinders, as fdisk will allow you to specify your partition sizes in megabytes. Create your three partitions, hit the 'w' key to write out the new partition table and you're almost done. Once the partition table is written you can format your shares like this:
mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb1 mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb2 mkfs -text3 /dev/sdb3
Easy.