applets wish: beep and sfdisk

Mike Frysinger vapier at gentoo.org
Mon Aug 31 08:45:40 UTC 2009


On Wednesday 19 August 2009 03:41:00 walter harms wrote:
> Matthew Stoltenberg schrieb:
> >> interessting would be a tools that can handle disk >2TB. fdisk (and
> >> friends) cannot if i am informed correctly. This will make BB
> >> interessting for SAN.
> >
> > really?  I think it wouldn't be that hard to use long long for
> > pointers...
> >
> > course, on top of all this, we still would need a utility to put a
> > filesystem on there since e2fsutils got pulled from the package.
>
> The partition schema has problems with >2TB, so there is more that simply
> using a larger datatype, 2 TB is restriction of DOS partiton format.

right, it isnt a bug in fdisk, it's a limit in the spec:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
Both the partition length and partition start address are stored as 32-bit 
quantities. Because the block size is 512 bytes, this implies that neither the 
maximum size of a partition nor the maximum start address (both in bytes) can 
exceed 232 × 512 bytes, or 2 TiB. Alleviating this capacity limitation is one 
of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID Partition Table 
(GPT).

using util-linux's fdisk on a 3 TiB disk shows:
WARNING: The size of this disk is 3.0 TB (3000613662720 bytes).
DOS partition table format can not be used on drives for volumes larger than 
(2199023255040 bytes) for 512-byte sectors. Use parted(1) and GUID partition 
table format (GPT).

busybox's fdisk however doesnt have such a check/notice ... we should probably 
add it though.
-mike
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