Creating Large Partitions on Ubuntu

While I had my server open to mount the WD (formerly external) drive, I threw in the two 1.5Tb (!) drives I’d brought back from the US … yep, time to start regularly backing up all the machines sitting around the house.

GPartEd refused to create 1.5Tb partitions (kept getting the error “a partition cannot have a length of -1 sectors”).  Setting the disk label to GPT rather than MSDOS (as suggested here) didn’t do the trick.  Instead, what worked was a combination of cfdisk and mke2fs.  In my case (assuming /dev/sde):

sudo cfdisk /dev/sde

sudo mke2fs -j /dev/sde1

Finally, to get the volume ID (for ID-based mounting, which is always best!):

sudo vol_id /dev/sde1

… and add it to the fstab.