Formatting USB Drive

[Steven Heimann]

I have an approx 200GB drive in an external USB enclosure attached to a
box running Breezy Badger.

I decided to reformat the drive (get rid of that big ugly NTFS
partition) and back up all my current data before I give the beta of
Dapper Drake a go.

I have a problem where the formatting process seems to freeze part way
through.  I have tied this a number of times with and without bad block
checking.

The problem seems to be that for some reason the USB mounting mechanism,
which I don't understand, decides to move the partition somewhere else
part way through the procedure.  

For example I was just trying the following command (while I had my
breakfast) :

sudo mkfs.ext3 -cv -L usbdisk2 /dev/sdc1

It ran until it got to:

Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): 595596/ 61277926

and then froze.  I ran:

cat /etc/partitions

and this now shows:

  22     0  195360984 hdc
  22     1  151549146 hdc1
  22     2          1 hdc2
  22     3   19462747 hdc3
  22     4   22346415 hdc4
  22     5    2000061 hdc5
 253     0  151549146 dm-0
 253     1   19462747 dm-1
 253     2   22346415 dm-2
 253     3    2000061 dm-3
 253     4   20482843 dm-4
 253     5  224130847 dm-5
 253     6     497983 dm-6
   8    48  245117376 sdd
   8    49  245111706 sdd1


i.e. the external drive has suddenly moved from sdc1 to sdd1.

Can anyone tell me how to get around this problem?

Thank you and regards
Steven