3ware 9650SE with large disk arrays
The 3ware 9650SE controller causes a kernel panic when running fdisk. This doc explains why.
According to a 3ware knowledge base article you cannot use fdisk when you have a large partition (ie >2TB). This white paper explains it in a bit greater detail. I still couldn't find an explanation for why using fdisk causes a kernel panic (an oops). The best way to deal with this is in the real world is probably to uninstall fdisk or make it a shell script that refers to this page. The recommended partitioning tool is parted.