External drive partitioning problems

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 12/11/2011 01:15 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>
> Am 11.12.2011 19:12, schrieb Robert Moskowitz:
>> I just got a LaCie 1Tb USB drive.  I want to delete their 10Mb NTFS
>> partition then create one 1Tb EXT4 partition.
>>
>> When I DiskUtility I get the following error when I try to delete the
>> NTFS partition:
>>
>>
>> Error erasing: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_del_partition:
>> device_file=/dev/sdb, offset=400886272
>> Entering MS-DOS parser (offset=0, size=1000204886016)
>> MSDOS_MAGIC found
> use fdisk or gparted and create a new partition table

So help me here a bit with fdisk.  I have the following:

fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x24796452

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1          782981      803458       10239    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)