Problem creating external journal with ext3

[Jeff Layton <laytonjb att net>]

Afternoon,

I've been trying to create a new ext3 that has an external journal.
I have two 500GB SATA drives (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb) that I'm
using for my experiments. I partitioned /dev/sda into a single
partition (/dev/sda1) and I partitioned /dev/sdb into two partitions,
/dev/sdb1 that is 1024M in size and /dev/sdb2 that is the remainder.
I want to create an ext3 file system on /dev/sda1 and use /dev/sdb1
as an external journal. (BTW - I'm running the 2.6.28.7 kernal and
1.41.4 for efs2progs).

I've tried various commands and they all fail. What I'm currently
trying,

mke2fs -O journal_dev /dev/sdb1
mke2fs -t ext3 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdba1
tune2fs -o journal_data -j -J device=/dev/sdb1 /dev/sda1

gives me an error at the very end:

tune2fs: The ext2 superblock is corrupt
      while trying to open journal on /dev/sdb1

Any ideas?

TIA!

Jeff