Not able to format a 4TB drive on ubuntu

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

On 2020-09-18 13:34, Ian Bruntlett wrote:

> Hi All, 
> 
> I did some searching and found:- 
> _"In other words, 4TB HDD can be used in Windows in some conditions. According to Microsoft, in order for an operating system to fully support storage devices that have capacities that exceed 2TB, the device must be initialized by using GUID partition table (GPT)."_

Heh -- sadly, you did what I did at first, too, which was gloss over the
CLI interaction.  But in Noah's original e-mail, he's clearly
implementing GPT.  So that's (almost certainly) not the problem. 

I would be very interested in what "dmesg" finds when the kernel is
initializing the disk, e.g., from my own system, 

[ 2.298824] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST3000DM 001-1CH166 PQ: 0 ANSI:
5
[ 2.299039] scsi 3:0:0:1: Direct-Access ST316081 5AS PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 2.299227] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 2.299355] sd 3:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 2.494308] raid6: avx2x4 gen() 25573 MB/s
[ 2.542306] raid6: avx2x4 xor() 16446 MB/s
[ 2.583352] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Very big device. Trying to use READ
CAPACITY(16).
[ 2.583538] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] 312581808 512-byte logical blocks: (160
GB/149 GiB)
[ 2.585812] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 5860533168 512-byte logical blocks: (3.00
TB/2.73 TiB)
[ 2.587298] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[ 2.589594] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 2.590286] raid6: avx2x2 gen() 21042 MB/s
[ 2.590686] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
[ 2.592990] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
[ 2.594559] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] Write cache: disabled, read cache:
enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 2.594785] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache:
enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA 

So, we see that "scsi 3:0:0:0" correlates to "sdb" which, in turn, shows
5860533168 512-byte blocks.  I'm curious to see if similar numbers do or
don't show up with the 4 TB disk -- and what does show up if not.  I
suppose there's at least a chance it's a controller issue? 

-Ken
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