A systems administrator installs a 4 TB SATA drive in a RHEL 9 file server. After creating a single partition with fdisk, the mounted XFS file system reports only 2 TB of usable space. Running parted -l shows:
Disk /dev/sdc: 4000GB
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 2000GB 2000GB primary xfs
Attempts to add another partition fail with the message, "partition length exceeds the msdos-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295 sectors." Which action will allow the server to use the drive's full capacity without replacing hardware?
Create two 2 TB primary partitions and merge them with LVM into one logical volume.
Recreate the disk label as GPT and build an XFS partition that spans the full 4 TB.
Flash the drive so it reports 4096-byte sectors instead of 512-byte sectors.
Enable Large Block Addressing (LBA) in firmware to permit access beyond 2 TB.
The drive was initialized with an msdos (MBR) partition table, which can address only 2 TiB because its sector fields are limited to 32 bits. Disks larger than this must use the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Re-creating the disk label as GPT and then building or extending a file system across the entire disk removes the 2 TiB barrier. Merely enabling LBA, flashing firmware, or combining two MBR partitions does not overcome the sector-count limit of the msdos scheme.
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Why does MBR have a 2 TiB limitation?
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What is GPT, and how is it different from MBR?
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What is XFS, and why was it chosen for the file system?