Not able to format a 4TB drive on ubuntu

[Noah]

Hi there,

Ken is the winner to solving this issue.  A new drive box arrived 
yesterday, and I can properly see drive size values and parted works 
well at creating partitions.

sda      8:0    0  1.9T  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0  512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2   8:2    0  1.9T  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0  2.7T  0 disk
sdc      8:32   0  3.7T  0 disk

Cheers,

Noah


On 9/18/20 2:49 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> 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
> 
>