Linux fdisk and the 2TB limit

Hold on Cowboy

This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. The Times They Are A-Changin'

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