cfdisk doesn't like 3TB disk

I tried creating a 3TB (minus 50GB) partition on a new blank 3TB hard disk. I created it as a primary partition from the start of the disk. But the created partition was only on 721863828 (721GiB). Deleting it and then trying again (this time with one primary partition filling the whole disk) gave the same problem.

Trying with fdisk worked better, but still only created a 2TB partition when I asked for a 3TB partition. cfdisk could no longer open the disk!

Using parted worked: http://icesquare.com/wordpress/how-to-install-a-3tb-drive-on-linux/

While I (now) understand that this is probably because of parted's support for gpt, I still think cfdisk and fdisk were not as helpful as they should have been. They should have returned an error message when trying to create impossible partitions, instead of silently creating the wrong partitions.

t@t ~sys/disk/by-uuid> lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
Release: 10.04
t@t ~sys/disk/by-uuid> apt-cache policy util-linux
util-linux:
  Installed: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.10.04.2
  Candidate: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.10.04.2
  Version table:
 *** 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.10.04.2 0
        500 http://dk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.17.2-0ubuntu1.10.04.1 0
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Packages
     2.17.2-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://dk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages