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Anyway, the filesystem needs to support a very large partition (500GB). IIRC, this can't be done with FAT32, or am I wrong?

FAT32 filesystems can be up to 2TB (2048GB). However, Windows won't let you create filesystems that big: you'll have to do the initial format under Linux (or OS X, if that lets you make big FAT filesystems). Windows will use a filesystem that big perfectly happily, just its formatter is nobbled.

Edit: You can get mkdosfs for Windows, which isn't nobbled and can format large FAT filesystems.

Editto: Mind you, on a 500 billion byte disk, the FAT itself will be over 58MB in size (4 bytes per cluster, 32Kbyte clusters). You'd better not plan on mounting that filesystem on machines that are short of memory.

Peter