be careful using fdisk on ubuntu 10.04: max 2TB partitions! RAID RAID5 RAID6

[alfonso78]

Hi,

this is just a warning for something I've just learnt the hard way: be careful in using fdisk!
As far as I understand, it cannot create partitions bigger than 2TB.

I copied and copied data on my RAID volume to find out it was full, so I had to start all over from scratch!

Only when cp complained there was no more space, I found out.

So after you create a new raid array with mdadm (in case you have a RAID setup like me) check the size of the partition you create and don't use fdisk.

To recreate the partition I did the following:


parted /dev/md0
mklabel gpt

to enable GPT on the partition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

and then


gparted /dev/md0

to create a single partition that uses all the space in the disk (I couldn't quickly find a way in parted to say "use all space in the device").

Hope this helps someone!

[CharlesA]

You use GPT on anything larger then 2TB since the limit of the msdos partition table is 2TB - so +1. :)

I've been using gparted to partition drives smaller then 2TB for a while now as well (using GPT).