Mark Haney wrote: > Does anyone know the deal > with FDISK? Are there plans to fix that little problem? I mean pretty > soon 2TB is gonna be a drop in the bucket for most filesystems, and > considering ext3 handles 64TB or more, this seems a horrible limitation. Dave Jones referred to it up-thread. For example: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/release-notes/as-zseries/RELEASE-NOTES-U1-s390x-en.html says: · The commonly-used MS-DOS partition table format can not be used on devices larger than 2 TB. For devices larger than 2 TB, the GPT partition table format must be used. The parted utility must be used for the creation and management of GPT partitions. To create a GPT partition, use the parted command mklabel gpt. Don't worry about the "zseries" or the "s390" in the URL: that's just the system that's most likely to hit this issue. It's talking about the same partition table format. It's not a bug in fdisk: it does exactly what it's supposed to do -- handle MS-DOS style partition tables. It's those tables that can't handle devices larger than 2 TB -- there just isn't enough space in the fields. It's a harder limit than 640K was for real-mode DOS, or 2 GB was for FAT16. Change the partition table format so it can handle larger devices, and *it's not DOS partition table format any more*, and operating systems that don't know about the new format can't use the disk. At all. And if you're going to go for something other than traditional MS-DOS partitions, you might as well go for something with a reasonable -- er, *any* design, that doesn't have the archaic "4 primary, one of which may be extended, and umpteen logical" limitations. Like GPT. Note that none of this refers to the format of filesystems within those partitions (ext3, reiser, FAT32, etc). It refers to the way the partitions themselves are defined and stored on disk. The partition table chops up the disk into partitions, and then you put "normal" filesystems in the partitions. [1] James. [1] Or not. Swap partitions and raw device access are beyond the scope of this e-mail... -- E-mail address: james | DON'T be put off by "horror stories" spread by @westexe.demon.co.uk | others. People who talk about death and serious | injury are very rarely the ones who have actually | suffered such things. -- Adrian Plass
