Weird disk problem

[A.J. Bonnema]

Hi all,

I have been running FC for a long time now.
While switching from FC6 to FC7 I came across the following weird problem.

I have two 250G disks on SATA. Using QTParted I discovered the second 
disk has a lot of free space (like 120G).
But QTParted refuses to do anything other than show its properties.

I can not use it to allocate a new partition, be it primary or extended.
All commands are greyed out.

So I thought, hey, I have still got fdisk.
But fdisk doesn't recofnize the space at all.
Neither as a partition, nor as free space.

Okee, so I started installing F7. As long as I leave that particular 
piece of "free space" alone all is well.
But, if I want to define a new partition (primary, extended or logical) 
  the install utility anaconda crashes! And forces a reboot. And I have 
no idea how to save the debug output it serves.

Who has any idea what I can look for?
I was thinking along the following lines:

1. Is it a hardware problem? How can I determin that? Or rather 
eliminate that?

2. If it is not hardware, what could it be?

===== start fdisk output ==============

[root at athene]~# fdisk /dev/sdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 30401.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         131     1052226   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2             132       11227    89128620    5  Extended
/dev/sdb3           11228       11358     1052257+  83  Linux
/dev/sdb4           11359       14622    26218080   83  Linux
/dev/sdb5             132        7964    62918541   83  Linux
/dev/sdb6            7965       11227    26210016   83  Linux

Command (m for help): n
No free sectors available

Command (m for help):
====== end fdisk output ===============

Guus.
-- 
A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands,
user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)