I got a 1TB Toshiba Portable Drive and I was looking for a way to format and label the drive. While searching here’s what I stumbled upon, pretty quick & easy:

mkdosfs -n ‘YOURLABEL’ -I /dev/sdb1

The same can be achieved using mkfs as follows:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1 -n YOURLABEL

Once done, you can verify using blkid:

blkid /dev/sdb1

Just a little update, to be able to copy files larger than 4GB (across Windows) you must format the drive using NTFS.

mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdb1 -Q -L YOURLABEL

We use the -Q option for quick formatting.