Making a very large disk

Multi Terabyte Partitions

Because this is not done often, no body bother's to make it easy, until Seagate comes out with an >2TB drive, maybe.

The problem is that fdisk will not make a large partition. So use parted. See Parted User Guide RTFM!
Here is a howto: Mini-Howto on Big Disks

Steps:

 parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt                  # Make a GPT disk label (partition table) which can deal with >2TB
 parted /dev/sda print                        # Print the current geometry back. This will tell you the size of the disk
 parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext3 0 5000GB # Make a partition, starting at 0 and 5TB in size.
 mke2fs -j -m0 -L tarodata /dev/sda1          # Make a file system, ext3, no extra space for super user, with label.

That's All Folks.