3tb USB drive on FBSD 8.1-release

[Mantazz]

I recently picked up a WD My Book 3tb USB drive that I am intending to use to backup data from my home web server. I overlooked the significance of the 2tb size limit for MBR style partitioning and blindly went ahead with setting up this drive recently.

Because this drive will be backing up data from a variety of systems on my network, I opted for the Linux ext2 file system; the thinking being that if my home web server were to become nonfunctional the drive could be attached to almost any other system and the files still read from it successfully.

My initial attempt (before realizing the error of my ways in overlooking the 2TB limit) was with the partition editor in sysinstall. I wiped out the original partition table on the USB drive (likely NTFS) as I had no need for ti. Then I tried to set up a new partition of type "linux". It seemed to work OK although the geometry didn't look quite right... I then ran mke2fs on the drive and it gave a few errors

Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block from filesystem resulted in short write

But proceeded through nonetheless. It did end with a few more errors as well:

Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
Warning:: Too many arguments.
Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block from filesystem resulted in short write
Warning:: Too many arguments.

However then I couldn't mount the volume:

mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/wd-usb
mount: /dev/da0s1 : Invalid argument

Then gdisk doesn't show a partition table, either. Am I supposed to use a different utility to format the drive after I partition with gdisk?