Creating a Partition Larger Than 2 TB

If you want to create a partition larger than 2 TB on a linux operating system, fdisk utility will not cover your need. Parted is a good partitioning editor and may help you to create a partition larger than 2 TB.

Here is a step by step example of creating 4 TB partition:

In this example, physical disk name is sdh.

First we can check size of the disk: (third tab shows the size and we can calculate it in megabytes by dividing 1024, 4392296448/1024 = 4289352 )

# more /proc/partitions |grep sdh

8   112 4392296448 sdh

Run parted:

# parted /dev/sdh

In parted prompt, print command displays the partition table selected device :

(parted) print

Disk geometry for /dev/sdh: 0.000-4289352.000 megabytes

Disk label type: gpt

Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name                  Flags

As shown, there is no partition configured.

Disk label can be set by typing mklabel:

(parted) mklabel gpt

mkpart is used creating the partition:

(parted) mkpart primary 0 4289352

We can confirm that the partition is created by typing:

(parted) print

Disk geometry for /dev/sdh: 0.000-4289352.000 megabytes

Disk label type: gpt

Minor    Start       End                  Filesystem  Name              Flags

1             0.017     4289351.983

We can quit:

(parted) quit

To format the partition:

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdh1

Now, we have a formatted 4 TB disk partition to use.