How do I get rid of a troublesome partion?

Here is a newbie question that is hopefully easy to solve for the informed.

I have Ubuntu 6.10 installed on the second partition (hda2) of the master disk with XP residing on the first partition (hda1), dual booting with GRUB. Also in the file system are two partions on a smallish second drive (hdb1=ext3) and (hdb2=ntfs) which mount automatically at boot time. This setup has worked fine since I installed it about six months ago.

Now, the problem is that I recently reformatted the hdb1 partition (again to ext3 format), and since then the start-up fsck check fails and complains that the file system needs to be repaired manually. (See below for the actual message.)

I can in fact continue booting as usual after this message appears, but as this procedure happens every time I boot, it gets disturbing.

All the other partions, including hdb2, mounts (at /media/hdb2 etc) as before, but hdb1 does not. Looking at hdb1 in the "Device Manager" utility I notice that its UUID is entirely different from the one fsck is trying to resolve (see below).

Questions:
1) How do I get the system to accept the fact that hdb1 "is no more" and simply forget about it, instead of trying to mount it every time?

2) Alternatively, how can I regenerate the file system to incorporate the "new" hdb1, just as it is?

3) Another alternative would be erasing the ext3 partion and then extend the ntfs to be the only partion on this disk. Would this be easy to do without risking messing things up further?

This is the screen text:
------------------------

*Checking file systems ...
fsck 1.39 ...[etc]

  -------[Snip]-------

There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  71:44/00, 72:4f/00, 73:53/00, ...[etc]

    -------[Snip]-------
  ..., 81:20/00.
Not automatically fixing this.

/dev/hda3: 22 files, 368/1278928 clusters.
/dev/hda6: clean, 10983/13356288 files, 469052/13352015 blocks.
fsck.ext3: Unable to to resolve 'UUID=ff2624f1-7588-402a-be1c-7f5e34cebf5e'
fsck died with exit status 8.

*File system check failed.
A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable.
Please repair the file system manually.

*A mainatenance shell will now bet started ...[etc]
  -------[Snip]-------