Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

Novartum · 2011-03-26 01:56:12

I just bought a new Western Digital My Book Essential External Hard Drive (3 TB). I ran fdisk and deleted the four existing partition, created a new primary one that covered all sectors (type 83) and when I type w (write) I get:

The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22: Invalid argument.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8)
Syncing disks.

I have rebooted and the partition scheme seems very strange. fdisk -l shows System type as HPFS/NTFS/exFAT; fdisk /dev/sdb1 (the device) > p shows what seems to be the whole external hard drive as Linux (type 83); cfdisk /dev/sdb1 shows the following partition scheme:

[u]Name       Flags     Part Type    FS Type   [Label]   Size (MB)[/u]
                      Pri/Log     Free Space          0.14       *
sdb1p1                Primary     Linux               375069.61  *
                      Pri/Log     Free Space          2625488.16 *

Not exactly sure what is going. I would simply like to format everything on the hard drive, make an ext3 partition and use it to backup my arch linux system as a cron job (rsync). Thank you in advance for any help and let me know if there is any additional information that I could provide.

Last edited by Novartum (2011-03-27 19:43:46)

thisoldman · 2011-03-26 11:30:46

Did you try using partprobe?

I'm no hardware expert and all I can offer are suggestions.

For a single partition, you may be running into a hardware limit, perhaps a BIOS limit. Try to use at least two partitions and see if the situation improves.

In my opinion, a 3TB partition would be a hassle. An fsck would take forever.

stqn · 2011-03-26 14:00:32

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Master_boot_record wrote:

(...) either the maximum size of a partition or the maximum start address (both in bytes) cannot exceed 2.19 TB or 2 TiB

It is my understanding that to make partitions bigger than 2TiB, you should use a GUID Partition Table. I'd also be more confident using gparted than fdisk, but maybe fdisk is fine .

Edit: I've never made a GPT disk, don't know if gparted does it, in fact...

Edit2: fsck is reasonnably fast (maybe 1 min) on a 1TB ext4 partition.

Last edited by stqn (2011-03-26 14:11:25)

JokerBoy · 2011-03-26 14:01:49

..or maybe gdisk..

graysky · 2011-03-26 14:11:05

stqn is right... GTP is needed.
JB is right, use gdisk. Example on the SSD wiki page.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SS … DED_METHOD

Novartum · 2011-03-27 19:44:20

Worked with gparted, probably due to the 2 TB limit. Thanks for the help.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-03-26 01:56:12

Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

#2 2011-03-26 11:30:46

Re: Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

#3 2011-03-26 14:00:32

Re: Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

#4 2011-03-26 14:01:49

Re: Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

#5 2011-03-26 14:11:05

Re: Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

#6 2011-03-27 19:44:20

Re: Western Digital External Hard Drive-Issues repartitioning [SOLVED]

Board footer