Can't mkfs a new drive

[Dave Martini 1]

I installed a new 160gig drive into my DELL running RHEL 3.
I went into the setup utility/bios and enabled drive 2.
I have 4 partitions on the sda boot drive.
I did an fdisk and created 1 extended partition using the entire drive.
When I run mkfs I get this error

mke2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
mkfs.ext3: No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size
[root at host1 root]# fdisk -l  /dev/sdb

Anyone have any ideas??? Do I need to format this drive first
for use with Linux? How do I do that?

Thanks
Dave Martini
LLNL

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1       127   1020096   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           128      1019   7164990   83  Linux
/dev/sda3          1020      1274   2048287+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda4          1275     14000 102221595   83  Linux
[root at host1 root]# fdisk /dev/sdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19452.
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: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             1     19332 155284258+   5  Extended

Command (m for help): q

[root at host1 root]# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
mkfs.ext3: No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size
[root at host1 root]# fdisk -l  /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             1     19332 155284258+   5  Extended