[Hampshire] Adding a file system on a removable disk

Hi,

trying to build a backup box for work with removable SATA disk
caddies. The idea is that it mirrors a Buffalo TeraStation repository
on the works LAN and The Boz can take a disk home with him at the end
of the day, replace it with another, and thus have Peace of Mind(tm).

Since He has Winboxes and all the 'office' LAN is Winboxes I thought
that making the removable disks NTFS rather than ext3 would make them
more accessible.
(Although he would need to fit a caddy drawer on a winbox to access it).

I've put Ubuntu LTS 6.06 on a bare new HP Proliant with a drawer
fitted for a removable disk caddy.

Tried putting a bare new disk in the caddy, used parted to put a
single partition and fat32 filesystem on it:
parted) mkfs 1 fat32
(parted) p
Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0kB - 320GB
Disk label type: msdos
Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
1       32kB    320GB   320GB   primary

But on trying to mount it I get this:

root@backup:~ # mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

and dmesg says:

[17200424.788000] NTFS-fs warning (device sdb1):
is_boot_sector_ntfs(): Invalid boot sector checksum.
[17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1):
read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.
[17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1):
read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option errors=recover not used.
Aborting without trying to recover.
[17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1): ntfs_fill_super(): Not
an NTFS volume.

I've added to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1       /mnt/backup     vfat    umask=0,quiet   0       0

Googling for the dmesg messages yeilds threads where people are trying
to do dual booting which is not my agenda.

I dunno much about WIndows disk/file systems (*). Do I need to set up
a boot sector for each disk even if I don't have any need to boot from
them?

and then ...

I'm assuming I would be able to do a cron/rsync setup to mirror the
repository onto the removable disk drive. Will the choice of file
system affect that?

And has anyone heard of any nice idiot-proof hot-swap utilities (will
be used by The Boz while I'm not there) for Linux for the day to day
use of this?

thanks as ever

victor

(*) rather less than much, actually.