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

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
+
+
+
+