[CentOS] Curious fdisk report on large disk

Sun Apr 24 13:57:09 UTC 2011
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

I have a 1.5TB internal disk on my server.
I partitioned this with fdisk,
and CentOS-5.6 runs perfectly on it.
But fdisk gives a very strange report.

Here is the perfectly normal response to mount:
-----------------------------
/dev/sdb10 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sdb2 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sdb5 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb6 on /common type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb7 on /BackupPC type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb8 on /Photos type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)
-----------------------------
and here is the response to "sudo fdisk /dev/sdb"
-----------------------------
Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   ?      188019      188051      253319   e4  SpeedStor
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb2   ?       62656      186401   993984023   98  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb3   ?      105611      225119   959953209   7d  Unknown
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb4   ?         347         865     4161536    0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
-----------------------------

Does fdisk not like large disks?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland