To me, this sounds like a BIOS limitation, what does the BIOS report the drive size as? Also, be sure you don't have any type of cylinder limitation jumpers installed, I believe these cap at an 8GB limit and then you use BIOS overlay software, such as MaxBlast/EzDrive to provide BIOS emulation for the full drive size. I would check your motherboard vendor's site to see if there are any applicable BIOS updates. What is the total drive size?
As FYI, the command you posted above simply low-level formats the drive.
/dev/hda = Primary Master
/dev/hdb = Primary Slave
/dev/hdc = Secondary Master
/dev/hdd = Secondary Slave
I don't think doing a low-level format will yeild the results you are wanting.
Hope this helped,
Nathan