carving out partitions on raid sets

[mashtin . bakir]

We have a couple of RHEL5 boxes each with Promise Tech Vess1830 SAS 
RAIDs. The boxes came with an older version of parted (1.8) so I just installed 
v2.2 which indeed seems to work better. For some reason, I can't seem to mkfs
though.  Here's what I do:

Create a RAID set on the RAID via the Promise Tech Web GUI,
cat /proc/partition on the Linux side and it sees the devices as does syslog
(and correctly identifies them as VessRAID1830)
fdisk -l also sees them as such but since each RAID set is 4 disks of 2TB
each, fdisk can't handle that size. So I go into the new parted:

parted /dev/sdb
mklabel gpt
mkpart primary 0 -0
  This complains about alignment (even if I "parted -a optimal /dev/sdb"
   but seems to accept it anyway when I respond "Ignore".
   Also tried specifying various sizes eg 0TB to 5.4TB for RAID5
print  (shows the correct info)
quit
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1   however returns
The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?


Any ideas?

Thanks