Linux fdisk and the 2TB limit

Running out of space on the backup drive, I added another 1.5TB drive to the existing one to hold the company backup files. We do rsync style snapshots with a linux server and it was at 80% capacity. So I added another Seagate SATA to the simple Hardware RAID SATA card in the machine. Everything went well. Ran fdisk to partition the drive, ran mke2fs -f /dev/hde1 to format in EXT3 format. After that was done the

df -h

command showed only 2TB. That's odd, I know the filesystem takes some drive space, but not 1TB of it.

So after a little investigating you need to use a program called

parted

for drives >2TB. The commands are as follows

parted /dev/hde1

Once in the parted command prompt then you can run these commands on the new drive.

mktable gpt
mklabel 
mkpart primary 0 100%
quit

You can now format with

mke2fs -j /dev/hde1

References:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-901368.html

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>, <drupal5>, <drupal6>, <javascript>, <php>, <sql>. Beside the tag style "<foo>" it is also possible to use "[foo]".

More information about formatting options