[clug] fdisk :"Unable to write to /dev/sdb"

[Stephen Hodgman]

G'day All,
I have two Seagate 2TB Backup Plus USB 3 drives that I use for backup on
a CentOS 5 system.
When I received them I used fdisk to remove the NTFS partition and
created a Linux partition.
I then formated as ext3 and they are working fine.

Today I purchased another drive, the box was basically the same, the
drive case was slightly different but it was still 2TB.
I used fdisk, deleted the partion, created a linux partition, pressed
"w" to save it and it responded
"Unable to write to /dev/sdb".  The NTFS partition remains on the disk.

The device it not write protected.  I wrote to it with the NTFS partition.
When it loads, /var/log/messages says "Write protection is off"
The only real difference that I can see is that this new drive logs as
New Disk:
SCSI device sdb: 488378645 4096-byte hdwr sectors
Old (working) Disk:
 SCSI device sdb: 3907029167 512-byte hdwr

They both multiply to 2TB but is there an issue with 4096 sectors?
Or, does anyone have a suggestions as to why fdisk will not write
partitioning to the disk?
Thanks.

-- 
Steve Hodgman
Mob: 0407 182 355
Ph:  02 6236 6380