Comment 1 for bug 543838

After trying some more things - I think this is a problem with the partition manager - not the kernel. If I switch over to console two during install and manually run mkfs.xfs or mkfs.ext4 or similar commands on the command line on the large partition, they work fine and I can then mount the newly created filesystem and checking dmesg everything seems fine so it seems to just be a problem with the GUI installer.