Formatting a Hard Drive

[vbilly]

I have been running CentOS boxes for a little bit now and though I am no pro I am rather comfortable. The other day I got a new backup server that has a 36GB drive that I put my OS on and 8 x 750GB drives on a 3Ware raid card that will be a storage array.

When I first went to setup the install it wanted to put the array as sda so I pulled the 3ware card, thus allowing it to only see the 36GB system drive. I formatted that drive and installed the OS as needed and everything worked fine on that.

I popped the 3ware card back in set up the 3ware for the raid options I want and that all went well. I go to fdisk to format my new /sdb and when I look at the partition table it sees the whole array:

Disk /dev/sdb: 5249.9 GB, 5249921187840 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 638266 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

However when I create a partition, choosing the default cylinders it only sets it up as a 750GB partition. If I try to choose any higher cylinders it tells me that they are not available. It will let me create another partition, but at max at only 250GB so I am losing about 4.2tb of space here.

Any ides on how to get use from the whole drive? I also tried parted and it said I could not stretch the partitions.


p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-103568, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-103568, default 103568):
Using default value 103568

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 5249.9 GB, 5249921187840 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 638266 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 103568 831904317+ 83 Linux

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
Billy

[foxb]

Fdisk does not support big paritions

you need to use parted to create special partition

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/fdisk-unable-to-create-partition-greater-2tb.html

[vbilly]

Thanks. That definitely did help. It still is not letting me format the entire array (losing about 500mb now). Losing 500mb of space is much better then losing 4TB of space however so I won't complain too much.