[SOLVED] A parted question

taylorkh · 07-10-2014, 03:04 PM

I am taking the liberty to post this in Newbie as I believe I am overlooking the simple part of the task at hand. I am in the process of partitioning a 4 TB Western Digital drive for my Linux 12.04 server and am running into the "Partition not aligned..." issue. The simple fix seems to be

Code:

sudo parted --align optimal /dev/sdc

and then creating the partition with the mkpart command. However...

I have used fdisk since the days when LARGE hard drives were 40 MB and it would allow me to make a single partition by just pressing <Enter> to default the start and end of the partition to the start and end of they physical disk. parted seems to require me to specify the starting and ending locations for the partition. Unfortunately I do not know these values nor where to find them.

That said, I have a second drive of the same model which (I think) I formatted with Gparted. If I copy the parameters from that drive

Quote:

(parted) print
Model: ATA WDC WD40EZRX-00S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 4001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 4001GB 4001GB ext4

and enter my command to create the partition on the new drive as

Code:

sudo parted  --align optimal /dev/sdc
mkpart primary 1049kB  4001GB

it seems to work OK. Disk Utility does not complain about the partition not being aligned, I can create an ext4 file system and all is well. Except...

I really need to create two partitions on the new drive. One will be 1 TB and the second to include the rest of the drive. So the questions are...

How do I determine the correct starting point for the first partition? How do I determine how much space exists on a brand new raw drive or how much available space remains after one or more partitions have been created?

I have read forward and backward though the parted user's manual and this answer has eluded me. As usual I am probably missing something simple or obvious.

TIA,

Ken

keefaz · 07-10-2014, 04:21 PM

If you are familiar with fdsik, you could try gdisk or cgdisk for working with GPT paritions, it should be easier than with parted

taylorkh · 07-10-2014, 05:40 PM

Thanks keefaz!

gdisk is more like it. Works like a champ and aligns the partitions to the sector boundaries with no fuss nor muss.

Ken

p.s. Of course I forgot to remove the UUID from the old partition from fstab before rebooting and I had to climb behind the server and attach a keyboard to feed the machine an "s" so it would skip the partition which was no longer there