"Bad magic number"

[Edwin Humphries]

G'day all,

We're just fitting a second HDD into our new Fedora server, and 
getting error messages I don't know how to deal with.

The drive is near new, but we're not entirely sure of its provenance, 
so we're being cautious. However, it fdsisked fine, and running 
mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1 ran OK with no error messages.

But because of our cautions, I tried to check the drive for errors 
before using it for any data: ran e2fsck -c /dev/hdb.

The result was an error messages as follows:
|Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks ...
|e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open 
|/dev/hdb
|
|The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 
|filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 
|filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the 
|superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an 
|alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>  

Now I'm not sure what magic numbers or super-blocks are, and I have 
no idea how to fix this. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Edwin Humphries,
Ironstone Technology Pty Ltd
edwin at ironstone.com.au
www.ironstone.com.au
Phone: 02 4233 2285
Fax: 02 4233 2299
Mobile: 0419 233 051