Question About Partitioning A 4TB Drive

Hi All;
Can someone give me some guidance on partitioning a 4TB drive into one partition ?

My goal is to align the partition for best performance. I searched the net for advice and I've found a lot of information on it but am still confused.

After setting the label to gpt,

I tried mkpart primary 0% 100%
and I get the warning that the partition isn't aligned

then I tried mkpart primary 1 -1 (which I really hoped would get me completed)

and when I do an align-check on partition 1, it reports 1 aligned

but then when I do an fdisk -l,
I get the warning that partition 1 does not start on a physical sector boundary

I read that sector size is usually 512 bytes but on some (or perhaps all) larger disks, the sector size is 4096.

I am really not knowledgable in this area and not sure if the above message about partition 1 not starting on a physical sector boundary is important or what impact this will have to my performance. Since these 4tb drives are being used in a media server, I'd like them to be as fast and efficient as possible.

Can you offer some guidance or perhaps some commands on how to partition my (full) 4tb drive into one partition so it is aligned and also so the partition table starts on a physical sector boundary ?

Also, is there a Ubuntu utility to display the sector size of a disk?

I have been researching this issue off and on for a few weeks and would like to finally get this partitioning completed this weekend so I can get on with setting up my system.

Thanks.

Tim

I was wondering if I can repair my current partitioning setup using gparted, or if I should just reload Xubuntu. Basically I screwed up by making the primary partition only 256M, and made a massive extended logical partition for everything else, and did not leave swap space. I am doing this on an older PC with MBR, dual processor, 2G RAM each processor, 160GB hard drive space. It is single boot, no Windows. I would like the partioning to be as follows, leaving empty disk space for other Linux flavors:

/ 13GB ext4
/home 50GB ext4
swap 8GB swap

sudo parted /dev/sda print all
Code:

Model: ATA ST3160812AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 160GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size   Type      File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  256MB  255MB  primary   ext2         boot
 2      257MB   160GB  160GB  extended
 5      257MB   160GB  160GB  logical
                                                                       
Error: /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-swap_1: unrecognised disk label

Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root: 158GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number  Start  End    Size   File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  158GB  158GB  ext4
                                                                          
Error: /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: unrecognised disk label

df -hT
Code:

Filesystem                   Type      Size  Used Avail Use Mounted on
/dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root ext4      145G  6.5G  131G   5% /
none                         tmpfs     4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                         devtmpfs  989M  4.0K  989M   1% /dev
tmpfs                        tmpfs     201M  1.1M  200M   1% /run
none                         tmpfs     5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                         tmpfs    1003M   88K 1003M   1% /run/shm
none                         tmpfs     100M   24K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda1                    ext2      236M  120M  104M  54% /boot
/home/mbrk/.Private          ecryptfs  145G  6.5G  131G   5% /home/mbrk

Booted my computer with 2 USB flash drives inserted. One of the drives turned out to be an MS-DOS boot drive. The PC booted in DOS and wiped out the partition table of the other flash drive with my data on it. This second (64Gb) drive had a single 64Gb type 83 (Linux) primary partition (ext4 file system).

Is there a way to recover the data that's on the second stick?

I've been told that all I have to do is repartition it exactly as it was and my data will be there. But I'd like to have advice from the pros here before I start messing with it.

For the time being, I dd-ed the entire stick, as is, onto a blank partition of my hard disk (dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda14). The process completed without errors but /dev/sda14 is unmountable for the moment.

Thanks for any help.

OK Im pretty new to Linux and learning so much, but with RHEL6,

When your taking a test and they say to make a partition this size/name it this, how do you know which disk to partition if you do a listing?

I get so confused with the fdisk stuff and I would really love it if someone is kind enough to help me out.

I have an external disk connected to a raspberry pi to act as a nas, which I am accessing from a linux mint desktop machine.
The nas disk is 30GB, but according to my desktop machine, which connects through the file browser via samba, only around 318MB are reported as available.
If I try to copy a 400MB file it tells me there is insufficient space.
The disk is currently empty, so all 30GB should be available.

On the nas box, cfdisk seems to report the disk size and the partition size correctly:
Code:

                          cfdisk (util-linux 2.20.1)

                              Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                        Size: 30016659456 bytes, 30.0 GB
              Heads: 64   Sectors per Track: 32   Cylinders: 28626

    Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]        Size (MB)
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    sda1        Boot        Primary   ext4                             30016.66*

I'm not sure where to look next.

hello,

i am using slackware 14.1 and my partition table is given below
Code:

 sda1                    Primary   ext4                             60003.42 
    sda2                    Primary   swap                              8998.46
    sda3                    Primary   ext4                            119998.61
                            Logical   Free Space                           0.10*
    sda5        NC          Logical   Linux                           120739.34*
    sda6        NC          Logical   ntfs                            190356.39*
                            Logical   Free Space                          11.56

and i want to change Code:

sda5        NC          Logical   Linux                           120739.34*

Logical to primary partition.i don't know how to do it.i searched over internet but i can't understand could u any body please guide me how to do it.Thanks in advance.

Hi All;
I am new to Linux and Ubuntu. I am setting up a RAID for a media server and want to be sure I do it right and in the proper order.

Based upon feedback received on this forum I think it makes most sense to partition my 4 TB disks into 2 partitions of 2 TB each.

So am I correct in running MDADM FIRST on both (Unpartitioned) 4 TB disks to create RAID 1 and then partition (Using Parted) the resulting single 4 TB disk that I create with MDADM into two 2 TB partitions? Thanks.

Tim

Hey,

My PC has 298 GB of which approximately 179 GB is unallocated. The remaining estimated 119 GB is being used by two distro's: PCLinuxOS and Manjaro 0.8.12

When I have tried to add a new distro, having plenty of free space, I usually get a message telling me I can not proceed further due to my having four primary partitions.

I have a Swap partition of sufficient size to handle multiple distros almost 10 GB.

I installed PCLOS first and then Manjaro. I gave each approximately 12 GB for their 'Root' (/) Their Home (/home) partition was roughly 40 GB each.

{/dev/sda1 swap /dev/sda2 Extended (/dev/sda5, dev/sda6) "PCLinuxOS" /dev/sda3. /dev/sda4 "Manjaro 0.8.12"

For /dev/sda 5 & 6 I used 'Reiserfs' file system. For /dev/sda 3 & 4, I used Ext4.}

The way I look at it my root and home partitions are 'primary' thus taking up the four primary allowed. I seem ti either recall or seen somewhere, that beside 'Primary there was something called 'Logical'

Starting with PCLinux as a base could I make a new installation of Manjaro where (/) would be Primary and (/home) would be Logical?

Or would I need to start totally over with fresh installs of both Manjaro ant PCLinux?? Then make (/) primary and (/home) logical?

Would such a move allow me to install additional distros?

A thought could I make the changes in Gparted while keeping the distros as they are, just making the changes [primary & logical?]

TIA

herakles_14

Hi

I am very suprised! I previously had a Windows 7 desktop, dual boot with Windows Server 2012 R2. I didn't care much about 2012 R2, so I went with a Debian server on another computer.

I wanted to triple boot my computer, so I looked at my BIOS to see if my computer has UEFI support, but it doesnt, so I am not able to boot to GPT. One decision lead to another, and I decided not to install Hackintosh. As part of this process, I had converted it to GPT, and then back to MBR when installing Windows 8.1 Pro. Everything went well.

When I went to install Debian 7, it was not recognizing anything on that drive. I found out it was a backup GUID partition table left over. I used fixparts found on rodsbooks.com, and I fixed the disk partition table.

Now this is where things get weird. Before installing, I created a primary partition for /, and an extended partition with 5 logical partitions inside it. I installed Debian 7 from a live install DVD, and I manually created the partitions. I created a 4GB /, 16GB /usr, 4GB /var, and 64GB /home. Then I left a bunch of free space (~145GB) and then 16GB swap space. (I have 8GB ram, and I plan to hibernate sometimes).

After a successful installation, installation of packages, reboots, and frustration with PCI card problems, I rebooted to Windows 8.1.

Upon opening diskpart gui, I was greeted with the picture attached.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

I have followed all the instructions I have got from the net and made boot-able DVD's and USB sticks several different ways as people advise. I have done the same with Mint 17. I have created a partition (26G) and follow the install instructions 1: English 2:Has at least 7.4G available drive space. 4: Is connected to the internet. 5: Here it shows a page where I think it should display the drive options (but does not) If I push the "install now" button it comes up with an error "No root file system is defined --Please correct this from the partitioning menu" I close the installer and look at the drives in GParted and they are all there and the one I created for Linux is PARTITION - /dev/sda4 FILE SYSTEM - ext4
MOUNT POINT - /media/makulu/0C43086E0C43086E LABEL - Lin
SIZE - 26.02 GB USED - 590.07 Mb UNUSED - 24.44 GB FLAG - (blank)
No indication on how to fix the "No root file system" problem. I have tried so many bits of advise that I am beginning to think that I may be better of sticking to windows (perish the thought)
Can anyone help?
Col