[Bradford] New laptop, cannot mount partitions

[Devo Too]

Hi Folks,

Shiny new laptop received yesterday. Followed the Arch Wiki to set up 
from a .iso on a memory stick and all looked well until - immediately 
after partitioning the hard drive, trying the mount command.

For both sda2 (root partition set as Linux root (x86-64), using mount 
/dev/sda2 /mnt) and sda3 (home partition set as Linux filesystem, using 
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home having set up /mnt/home directory).

sda1 is an EFI System partition and mounted OK.

At the mount command, both partitions, response is:

/mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2, missing 
codepage or helper program, or other error

Google searches haven't thrown any light on the topic so far although it 
is a commonly reported problem.

Do any of you have ideas?

Could it be a hard drive problem? I've tried unsuccessfully to use both 
parted and fsdisk to do the partitioning. It's a 960GB hdd so I suspect 
it should have 4KB sectors rather than 512 bytes, although the system 
reports otherwise.

All pointers welcome.

TIA.

Mike