Linux and drives > 2 terabytes; questions.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 07:08:04PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   I picked up a 2 TB external USB drive for backup use today.  I noticed
> a few 3 TB drives were available.  So here are my questions.  I think I
> know the answers, but I've done stuff like that before,  So to save
> myself potential embaressment, I want to confirm...
> 
> 1) I know that "legacy-booting" linux only works up to 2.1 TB.  Can I
> make multiple partions?  E.g. boot from a 250 meg partition, and have
> the rest of a large drive mounted as one or more partitions?  This is a
> throwback to the old days of having the boot partition entirely within
> the first 1024 cylinders.

I have booted linux of a drive larger than 2TB for years.  Grub2 supports
that just fine.  Use a GPT partition table with an MBR compatibility
partition entry.  Having a boot partition is also required so grub has
somewhere to embed.

Windows can't boot from a drive over 2TB unless it is 64bit windows and
the system uses EFI instead of BIOS.

> 2) For non-boot usage (e.g. external USB drives), I don't think that 2.1
> TB should be a problem.  I use ReiserFS, which can handle up to a 16 TB
> partion.  Is that correct?

I didn't think anyone still used that reiserfs junk.  I don't need my
filesystem to eat my data on a whim.  Once was enough.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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