[Mageia-discuss] Can't I use a 3TB disk?

[David W. Hodgins]

> I am just curious, as I was looking at 2TB drives yesterday. Not that I
> am planning on buying a 3TB drive, but, is there a reason why Mageia
> can't partition a 3TB drive?

The sector numbers in the partition table in the dos style mbr are limited
to 32 bits.  With 512 byte sectors, that means sectors past 2TB cannot be
specified.

Using drives larger than 2TB either means using larger sectors, or a
different style of partitioning, such as a GUID Partition Table, aka
gpt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

The partitioning tool used in the installer, diskdrake currently only
works with dos style mbr partitioning.

Regards, Dave Hodgins