There's your first problem - you've made a FAT32 filesystem, but you're
trying to mount an NTFS one. That's not going to work.
Fundamentally, you need to decide which filesystem to use - FAT32 is much
easier to use, but is more limited. NTFS is a better filesystem, but Linux
has difficulty writing to it - I'm told the ntfs-3g driver has fixed that
now, but I don't have personal experience to confirm that (yet).
> I'm assuming I would be able to do a cron/rsync setup to mirror the
> repository onto the removable disk drive. Will the choice of file
> system affect that?
As long as your L-box can write to the filesystem, all will be fine.
> And has anyone heard of any nice idiot-proof hot-swap utilities (will
> be used by The Boz while I'm not there) for Linux for the day to day
> use of this?
IDE hotswap appears to be quite difficult; is that what you're planning on
doing?