Searching on the above message I find this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...la-4175449117/

Which doesn't exactly say how to fix it.

I'm putting a 1TB drive in my 'server' and when I ran fdisk I received that error message, looks like I need to use a different tool such as sfdisk or GPT but I haven't found a good how to on either. I've been just using fdisk all these years

fdisk will work just fine on a 1TB drive. You just need to make sure the partitions are aligned properly. Recent versions of fdisk will default to "sector" units rather than legacy "cylinder" units. If yours does not, either invoke it with the "-u" flag or use the "u" command interactively. Then, switch off the deprecated "DOS-compatible" mode ("c" command), and fdisk will default to Megabyte alignment, which is suitable for modern disks and SSDs.

I see some references to later versions of fdisk, wouldn't (Slackware) 14.1 have a more recent fdisk?
I'll try u and c when I get home.

the message is a bit of a red herring. Slackware 14.1 version of fdisk already defaults to the modern options of sector mode and non-dos mode for the partition table. If you create a first partition it will by default start at 2048 sector which is safe, as it is a multiple of 4kbytes (1MB). I had the same message which got me checking things, like you, only to find it was a false alarm.
If you format using ext4, then even if it wasn't aligned, it wouldn't make much speed difference. - see this report by ibm
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/ for a table comparing different formats for unaligned partitions

hi, the link you gave is mistyped. (here fixed)

thanks for the fix. bbcode messed me up again. I should just have left the link as is :-)