Ugh. That's it, alright. The partition table code under Linux
no longer permits filesystems to be created on partitions
of type "Extended". One must instead create parititions (logical drives)
within the extended partition, as you have on your other drive (/dev/hda),
and place the filesystems in those.
The restriction got added to help prevent folks from blowing away
their extended-partition filesystems by accident (a common occurance
among newbies).
To fix it, first backup your data if at all possible (boot an older
kernel, say 1.2.13, to give access to the partition to do the backup).
Then just try changing the partition type from "5" to "83",
which should do the trick. If that does not work, you'll need
to re-run mke2fs and then restore everything from the backup.
Cheers,
-ml