Feb 22
Format a large 3TB drive under Debian and mount it
fdisk does not support the newer very large disks, thus we need to rely on parted, which has the GPT option already built-in. In my case, I was installing large Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 3TB drives.
> parted /dev/sdb
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary 0 -1
(parted) print
(parted) quit
The mkpart primary 0 -1 means a partition from zero to what is there (-1), so the whole disk. print allows us to see if everything succeeded. After that, format the disk:
> mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
By default, this formatting reserves 5% of the disk for root. But as this disk is not the system disk, we can safely remove this limit:
tune2fs -r 0 /dev/sdb1
sets the reserved blocks (-r) to zero. After that you should plan where you want to mount your drive. In this example I want to mount the new drive at /mnt/drive, thus I do mkdir /mnt/drive, and then:
Use blkid /dev/sdb1 to find out the UUID of the new drive.
Then enter nano with nano /etc/fstab to update the fstab file like this:
UUID=<insertuuid> /mnt/drive ext4 noatime,user_xattr,errors=remount-ro 0 1
Here we completely switched of atime (relatime might be a bettert option on desktop systems where some applications use the atime timestamp to for example schedule backups).
After that run mount -a to mount all stuff from fstab, including our newly created drive. df -H should now list your new drive.