While partitioning a new 30Gb disc, I was initially confused to see the following error message:
sfere# mkfs -c /dev/hdc3 mke2fs 1.18, 11-Nov-1999 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09 /dev/hdc3: Not enough space to build proposed filesystem while setting up superblock
It turned out that due to the order in which I'd created partitions, cfdisk had made /dev/hdc3 be the "magic" partition which contains logical partitions. Hence, I was in effect trying to create a partition (a) in the wrong place and (b) almost as big as the disc.
Things you might want to do to avoid running into this problem:
This web page exists merely to produce a hit in search engines, so that anyone else who is as confused as I was by this error has a hint as to one possible cause.