There was a blog post that I have used multiple times to format a drive at or over 3TB in size. Unfortunately the original blog post recently went offline and I had to use the wayback machine to get it’s contents. The original URL of the post is: here and a link to the wayback machine archive of it is: here. If the original author puts the article back online I would be more than happy to link to it and remove the archived version I have posted below. I hope this helps other people as well but I am posting it here mainly as a guide for myself.
TL;DR:
lsblk to find the drive name (will be something like /dev/sdX where X is a letter) sudo parted /dev/sdX In the parted interactive console type: (parted) mklabel gpt (parted) unit TB (parted) mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB (Changing 3.00TB to the size of your drive) (parted) quit sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1 (Where X is the same as above and note the “1” now) sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdX1 mkdir /Your/Mount/Point/Here sudo blkid (Copy the UUID of your drive) sudo nano /etc/fstab Add the line UUID=YOUR-UUID-HERE-XXXX /Your/Mount/Point/Here ext4 defaults 1 2 then save and exit sudo mount -a
Your drive will be partitioned, formatted as ext4, and mounted.
Below is the original article:
I started off following the ubuntu guide for installing a new drive, which uses fdsik to create the partitions how ever after formatting and mounting I ran df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 2.0T 28G 1.9T 2% /mnt/kryten/disk5 `
Which is not 3TB
I then found this article which worked in the long run not sure if I typo’d a command but similar to this other user I had to run through the commands a second time for them to work.
To start with use parted instead of fdisk, this allows the gpt partition table that fdisk does not.
(parted) mklabel gpt Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue? Yes/No? yes (parted) unit TB (parted) mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB Warning: You requested a partition from 0.00TB to 3.00TB. The closest location we can manage is 0.00TB to 0.00TB. Is this still acceptable to you? Yes/No? yes ` basically after this point it showed up as a few KB after formatting, tried it again and it seemed to work much better.
(parted) mklabel gpt Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue? Yes/No? yes (parted) unit TB (parted) mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB (parted) print odel: Unknown (unknown) Disk /dev/sdb1: 3001GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: loop Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 0.00TB 3.00TB 3.00TB primary (parted) quit Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab. `
Format
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 $sudo parted /dev/sdb1 (parted) print Model: Unknown (unknown) Disk /dev/sdb1: 3001GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: loop Number Start End Size File system Flags 1 0.00B 3001GB 3001GB ext4 `
Reduce Reserved Space
By default 5% is reserved for the root to stop the driving becoming unusable when full, for data and not the main OS drive this does not matter too much, and 5% was decided when drives where much small. 5% of 3TB is 150 GB, way too much. Turn this down to 1% with:
sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdb1 `
Mount
sudo mkdir /mnt/kryten/disk5 sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/kryten/disk5 `
Find UUID
$ sudo blkid /dev/sda1: UUID="c41cba49-bd3a-41d7-961c-b4ad45d48ed1" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sdb1: UUID="d822c6af-9802-4d00-8de8-61f1653a854a" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sdc1: UUID="59a61ceb-fee3-460a-97c5-e9f115776daf" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sdc5: UUID="80f9c384-9a5a-4563-921a-5c25628e1b2e" TYPE="swap" `
Update /etc/fstab
$sudo vim /etc/fstab #/dev/sdb1 3TB drive replacing 1.5TB old UUID Below UUID=d822c6af-9802-4d00-8de8-61f1653a854a /mnt/kryten/disk4 ext4 rw,auto,user,exec,async,errors=remount-ro 0 1 #UUID=c41cba49-bd3a-41d7-961c-b4ad45d48ed1 /mnt/kryten/disk4 ext4 rw,auto,user,exec,async,errors=remount-ro 0 1