Tag Archives: Partitions

Creating and mounting a partition lager than 2 TB in Linux

This might be basics for some, but it’s a good thing to have bookmarked for the day you might need it. It helped me a lot.

Why can I only use 2 TB (TeraByte) of my 2+ TB drive in linux?

The answer is really simple. I guess you formatted the drive using “fdisk” which use a ms-dos partition table.
MS-dos partition table (MBR) is 32 bit, and thereby it can’t handle anything above 2 TeraBytes

How to create a partition above 2TB in linux

To fully use your 2+TB harddrive, you have to use a partition table that supports it. We now know that the MS-DOS partition table (MBR) does not, so what should you use instead? GPT.
GPT supports up to 9.4 ZB (ZetaByte). That’s 9895604649984 GB (GigaByte)!. It’s pretty safe to say, that you will not hit this limit in the near future.
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MySQL data on secondary hard disk

Having your MySQL data on a separate partition is important, why?

Having your MySQL data on a separate partition is important because when your root partition fills up and no space is left, your system won’t be able to boot and might crash when running, you then have to boot from a recovery disk to remove files before you can boot on your normal system again.
This is critical for servers that you can’t allow to be down for an hour or two!

The solution

The solution is easy, you just move your MySQL data to a separate partition, and this problem won’t occur any longer, the only thing that happens when you run out of space, is that the MySQL can’t write any new data to the database, which is better than the entire system crashing and being unable to boot.
In this guide i will show you how to make the changes needed to get this problem resolved.
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