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Why did my use of mkfs only create an 8GB partition?

In the mkfs man page, there's a mention of an "automagical" mechanism for finding the size of the parition. I guess this fails at some sort of size-limit (8GB ~ 33bit, odd...) so you need to specify the number of blocks. To find the number of blocks, you can use fdisk, using:

fdisk -l /dev/parition

The number of blocks is usually the last paramater of mkfs. For instance:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc3 12345

That will format /dev/hdc3 to a size 12345. Please do not make a mistake with the number of blocks.

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