Unable to make filesystem on SAN-attached storage (thin provisioned) through multipathd on disks larger than 2TB

Issue

Physical server attached to 4TB disk on EMC Symmetrix SAN and multipath. unable to create filesystems on disks with this size with mkfs.ext3. The partition is created with parted. When running mkfs.ext3 get error messages pasted in below in /var/log/messages. Same with mkfs.ext4.

Able to create filesystems on disks less than 2TB. Also replaced multipathd with EMC's Powerpath, can then make fs on 4TB disks with powerpath, so this leads to a bug in multipath - not allowing filesystems over 2TB.

To reproduce error:

RHEL 6.2 installation attached to 4TB disk:

$ multipath -l
mpatha (360000970000292601773533033343838) dm-3 EMC,SYMMETRIX
size=4.0T features='1 queue_if_no_path' hwhandler='0' wp=rw
`-+- policy='round-robin 0' prio=0 status=active
  |- 1:0:1:3 sde 8:64  active undef running
  |- 1:0:3:3 sdi 8:128 active undef running
  |- 1:0:2:3 sdg 8:96  active undef running
  |- 1:0:0:3 sdc 8:32  active undef running
  |- 2:0:0:3 sdk 8:160 active undef running
  |- 2:0:1:3 sdm 8:192 active undef running
  |- 2:0:2:3 sdo 8:224 active undef running
  `- 2:0:3:3 sdq 65:0  active undef running

$ parted /dev/mapper/mpatha
parted> mklabel gpt
parted> mkpart primary 34 4398GB
parted> quit

$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/mpathap1
<no output>

loops forever, gives messages like these in /var/log/messages:

Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 8:48.
Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: sd 1:0:0:3: [sdk] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: sd 1:0:0:3: [sdk] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: sd 1:0:0:3: [sdk] Add. Sense: Invalid field in cdb
Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: sd 1:0:0:3: [sdk] CDB: Write same(16): 93 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 22 00 7f ff ff 00 00
Apr 18 11:30:05 server kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdk, sector 34

This loops for every path, and for every sdX