I’m adding a second drive to an existing system.
I have done this in the past with no problems but this time.
I installed a 250g IDE drive as a slave on IDE1.
BIOS recognizes the drive.
I created a single partition on the drive with fdisk.
I created a file system: mkfs –t ext3 /dev/hdb
When I try and mount this drive: mount –t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb
I get: wrong fs, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1 or too many mounted file systems.
When I run e2fsck I get a error that the superblock could not be read.
I have tried rebuilding the File system, building 2 partitions on the drive and nothing I do seems to work.
Suggestions?
Could the Drive be bad out of the box?

ok let's just start by finding out what you actually did, because "mkfs –t ext3 /dev/hdb" couldn't ever work.... it should be /dev/hdb1 after correctly partitioning hdb1. and to step back further, what does "fdisk -l /dev/hdb" say?

My Mistake It was: mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1

/fdisk -l /dev/hdb

Disk /dev/hdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 30401 244196001 83 Linux