[expert] formatting a disk?

[Al Niessner]

I have created the partitions with fdisk -- set them to 83 -- on a new
disk, but how do I 'format' it with ext2?  I did a man on format, mount,
fdisk, fd, etc looking for a clue, but could find none.  When I do the
mount it complains that it cannot read the superblock and fails the
mount.

All help is appreciated.

Al Niessner