[Mageia-discuss] Partitioning tools

[David W. Hodgins]

On Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:33:23 -0400, Doug Lytle <support at drdos.info> wrote:

> I've purchased a Hitachi 3TB drive that uses 4k sectors.

The drive is using 4k physical sectors.  Is it using 512 byte logical
sectors or 4k logical sectors?

If it's using 4k logical sectors, you don't have to worry about
alignment.

If it's using 512 byte logical sectors, then you have two things to do.

Ensure partitions are aligned on  4k boundaries.

Use a gpt partition table, instead of a msdos style partition table,
as the msdos partition table cannot address anything beyond 2TB, due
to the use of 32 bit sector numbers.

I'd use gparted to partition the drive.  In gparted, select Device,
Create partition table, Advanced, and use the drop  down button to
select a partition table type of gpt.  This creates a msdos style
mbr with a fake 2TB partition, so that older partitioning tools
like fdisk won't see any free space, and uses the guid partition
table to store information about the real partitions.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table for details.

I think gparted will default to aligning the partitions on 1MB
boundaries, which is a multiple of 4k.

After you've partitioned the drive with gparted, you may be able to
use diskdrake to specify the mount points, and create the fstab
entries, but I'm not sure if it will work with a gpt partition table,
as I've never tried it.

Regards, Dave Hodgins