Generic overview of disk addition in Linux

Use fdisk to partition it

Use mkfs to format it, you want to format it as an ext3 type partition, you will want to tell mkfs to check for bad blocks. Read the man page
NOTE: Order of command params for this command MATTER, because mkfs is just a front end for various other programs that actually do the work

Then you will want to mount it, the command is mount, read the man page

Then you will want to tell the system to mount that partition automatically each boot, make an entry in the /etc/fstab file