Normally my good friend Mr. Google helps me, but this time all he has
created is confusion.
I have a brand new 4TB Western Digital hard disk (WD4001FAEX-0,
SATA-3, the expensive one ("Black") with 5-year warranty). I want to
format it as one partition ext4. I will never want to boot from this
disk; it is purely for data storage.
I started with Palimpsest, which sees it (/dev/sdc), but can't seem to
do anything with it. So I installed Gparted, which offers to create
partitions, but fails. My confusion started when Gparted asked me if I
wanted a primary partition or an extended partition. In the end it
didn't matter, because Gparted failed to create either kind of
partition. Google has utterly failed to explain the difference between
primary and secondary to me. There is also the matter of GUID
partitions, which I also can't get a clear understanding of.
My (dim) understanding is that the old 2TB partition limit is no longer
an issue since kernel 2.6. But that doesn't mean that the tools I am
using are aware that the limit no longer exists.
I tried fdisk, which sees the drive (sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc), but it
says that it is not suitable for large partitions and refers me to
parted. The man page for parted is too cursory for me to understand the
syntax. I think I need mkpart, but I'm not sure.
I could use some pointers here.
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