it's an 8GB that was partitioned/formatted for primary/extended/fat(32?)ntfs? I've removed the 2 existing partitions, and made 1 primary for the default/entire HD
More than likely what happened was that (before you ran mkfs), when you mounted the first partition the system auto-detected the existing 2Gb fat32 file system and successfully mounted it. This is because the start block of your new 8Gb partition is the same as the start block of the old fat partition. (fdisk just maniuplates the partition table it doesn't erase the disk).
Too late now, but if you'd looked at the time, you would probably have seen that the file system wasn't the full 8gb. If you'd continued to write/read from that files system it would have been fine, except that you wouldn't of had the full disk space.
Well that's my explanation for the "annomolie". But as far as I'm aware, you should always do a mkfs on a new partition before attempting to mount it.
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