Linux fdisk and the 2TB limit

Linux fdisk and the 2TB limit

Hold on Cowboy

This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. It's likely dead, dying, or wildly inaccurate.

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