It isn't the size of the disk it is the size of the sectors or something like that. Old kernels do not recognise the new sector size so they have difficulty with new disks.

At this point I tend to agree with suicidaleggroll.

Delete the partition and make a new one but only with the Ubuntu 12 live cd. See what happens then. You may loose some windows apps or product ability on windows if you do that.



(dunno if I want to say it might break it)

Are you sure this isn't one of the "Network Storage System" ?. Sits vertically in a base with RJ45 and USB plugs ...
I got one as an incentive to buy some (more) stuff on a visit to one of my hardware haunts a while ago. It's 2 TB in my case, and certainly has a Linux system running.

If it is, plug it into a router and see if it pops up on the network. Only (supposedly) configurable on Windoze/Mac. I set up a couple of users on XP then mount it on all my Linux systems via CIFS and backup via rsync. Works a treat after a bit of fiddling to get all the ducks aligned.

Ok, so here's another datapoint. I took the drive home and put it on my Oracle Linux 6 box. I was able to label and partition it (as a 3TB partition) with parted v2.2 and then created a file system with mkfs.ext4. I then was able to mount and write to it. I brought it back in to work this morning and am still unable to use it. parted print shows sdc1 as a 2GB linux-swap partition and sdc2 to be a 72GB ext3 partition, even though those devices do not exist in /dev. When I run parted mklabel gpt it errors out saying that partitions 16-64 have been written but it is unable to inform the kernel, probably because they are in use. I am using parted v3.3. I'm not sure what else to try.

Is this system at work a 64 bit system? I mean fully 64 bit support?

Yes, this is a 64-bit system, although I'm not sure what you mean by "fully 64-bit support".

You can install 32 bit OS versions on 64 bit hardware. In such a case even though the hardware is 64 bit it isn't really fully 64 bit because you're limited to what the OS version recognizes.

Also in Linux there are both 32 bit (i386, i586 and i686) packages and 64 bit (x86_64) packages. On many of the 64 bit systems you may have one or the other or both. Here again the package itself can become a limiting factor.

Well, I was never able to get this drive mounted on my SLES 11 box. Partition tables were unreadable (or more accurately, unexplainable) with both NTFS and EXT4. What I ended up doing was taking a spare box and installing OEL 6.2. I was then able to partition the drive with parted and create a filesystem with mkfs.ext4. The drive is now mounted and in use. One last data point is that this hardware is old:

Intel 945G motherboard
Phoenix Bios V6.00 (10/9/06)
Intel Pentium D processor

It seems that the issue was the OS, rather than the hardware.

Anyway, thanks to all who weighed in. Although I didn't accomplish the original goal the discussion was informative and useful to me.