Format Large File System / Hard Drive

Technology has pushed hard drive sizes to incredible amounts, however fdisk has a limitation of 1.5 TB. Which means if you have a 1.5 TB hard drive or greater and wish to use all of it as one partition you have to do the following to allow fdisk to work with it. In this example a second hard drive /dev/sdb will be used.

You will need parted/gparted installed. All other utilities used in this how to is installed by default on a normal install

Run parted /sbin/parted...It’s interactive, so the following commands are issued within the utility.

1) Make the disk label mklabel gpt

2) Create the partition mkpart primary 0 -1

3) Verify print

You will get something similiar to the following..

Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-38146.972 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 101.975 primary ext3 boot
2 101.975 38146.530 primary lvm

4) Exit the GNU Parted command shell quit

5) Finally, make the filesystem, from a console screen type mkfs.ext3 -m0 -F /dev/sdb1

6)Finally, you don’t want to wait for that big filesystem to fsck from time to time, so make sure it does not get checked unless you run the command yourself...In a console window type tune2fs -c0 -i0 /dev/sdb1

You can now mount your new file system like any other and place it in your /etc/fstab for auto mount on boot up