If you don't have anything else installed on that hard drive you can ignore the error message and use fdisk to create your new partitions. It may be that you have a very large HD and a version of the kernel and ' fdisk ' that doesn't support the huge newer drives. There are some amazing convolutions that we've gone through in the design of PC peripherals over the years. They did provide a full byte for the head. I'm going into these gory details for a point.
Modern equipment is far more sophisticated.
A modern hard drive has its own processor and cache. The micro controller processes going on in a typical cheap IDE or any SCSI drive that you'd use today take about the same computing power as the first PC that I ever used. They also typically have more memory than early PCs where capable of addressing. This basically takes the C, H, and S values, multiples them together and calculates a new disk block address based on the total. More likely you need to have a kernel which is updated for your situation.