curious now, the disk appeared to work fine after 'fdisk' and before mkfs... what gives ?
fdisk is used to partition the disk. mkfs then makes a file system (inodes etc) within a partition (allowing you to choose a type of file system, ext2 ext3 etc).
Is the disk that you partitioned second hand? Most likely you've simply repartitioned the disk with the same starting block for the partition in question and hence the same super block for that partition/filesystem. Even if the new partition is a different size, the superblock will still "show" the old file system. If the old file system is smaller than the new partition, --> ignorant bliss, if larger then all will be ok for a while until one day you step outside the partition, --> corruption.
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