40Gig IDE disk wrapping around at 32Gig?

[Stephen Williams <steve@icarus.com>]

During an install of RedHat 6.1 onto a Dell Dimension L600cx, I partitioned
the internal 40gig disk to include 4 partitions. I initially let the disk
druid do it, but it rendered the partition table unreadable. So I used
fdisk and partitioned it with primary partitions like so:

(sectors = 255, heads = 63)

/dev/hda1  1 -- 17         (136521 blocks)
/dev/hda2  18 -- 50        (265072 blocks)
/dev/hda3  51 -- 3967      (31463302 blocks)
/dev/hda4  3968 -- 4865    (7213185 blocks)

Problem is, any attempt to mkfs on /dev/hda4 seems to trash the filesystems
on hda1, hda2 and hda3. It makes an ugly mess.

RedHat 6.1 installs a 2.2.12 kernel, with patches. I'm ignoring /dev/hda4
for now and I've installed 2.2.17 from source. It seems reliable as long
as I ignore /dev/hda4. I haven't tried it w/ 2.2.17 installed.

Am I running into some limit here? Are there any known issues with
Linux 2.2.12 or fdisk (or mkfs.ext2) that might relate to this?
-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve@icarus.com              But I have promises to keep,
steve@picturel.com            and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."


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