new partition

[Gene and Amy Dascher]

OK,  I have just reclaimed 1.5GB from my Win98 partitions, and I want to
use it under Linux.  I ran fdisk to create a new partition, but every
time I try to mount the new partition, I get the following message:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda9,
       or too many mounted file systems

So here are my questions:
1.  How do you format a partition for use under Linux once you have used
fdisk to create that partition?

2.  How do you correctly mount that partition once it has been
formatted.  I have the following entry in my /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda9 /test  ext2    defaults   1 2

Thanks,
Gene