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

Norman Carver carver at cs.siu.edu
Sat Feb 23 05:38:02 CET 2013


On Friday, February 22, 2013 05:28:18 PM David W. Hodgins wrote:
> > 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.

Glad to know this about diskdrake.

People should also know that many 3TB drives now have 4k sectors
and so continue to work just fine with MBR partitioning.  All the
Seagate external drives I have bought in the last few months are
that way, and come MBR-partitioned with the entire disk in one
primary partition.

Norm





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