Large Storage Drives for Ubuntu Server

Nasho23

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My PC uses a GA EP45 DS3P Motherboard, which is Not UEFI. I have setup a Ubuntu Server 18.04 with Nextcloud 16. I now need to add 6TB Drives for each Nextcloud User.
Could someone please lay out the Steps and Commands to Format and Name these One Partition 6TB Drives, so that they are accessible by each User. I assume they will be Formatted to use the Ext4 Filesystem.
I am concerned about the 2TB limitations of Non GPT Drives and hope that there is a procedure to overcome this limitation, so that larger drives can be used.
I must inform that I am new to using Linux.
Regards.
 


I only have a vague answer here, sorry.
Some Legacy BIOS systems support GPT. But some do not.
I would just test it on a single drive if possible.

> fdisk -l
This will list all your drives.

You will see something like
/dev/sda 512GB
/dev/sdb 6TB
/dev/sdc 1TB

In the example above, the 6TB drive is /dev/sdb (yours might be different)
> fdisk /dev/sdb (or whatever your disk device is)
> g (for GPT)
> w (to write this partition table to the disk)

This will usually kick you out of fdisk, but if not, just press "q" to quit.
Go back into fdisk if it kicks you out.
> fdisk /dev/sdb (again)
> n (for new partition)
It will ask some questions here. File system type, size, beginning block, things like that.
You can just use the defaults if you want to create 1 single partition.
> w (to write this new partition to the disk)
(Again this will kick you out of fdisk, or press q to quit)

Now you need to create a file system on the partition you just made.
> mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb (replace /dev/sdb with whatever your disk device is)
or if you want you can use XFS
> mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb

This will take a few seconds depending how fast your drives are.

Now try to mount your new filesystem.

> mount /dev/sdb /mnt
Hopefully you wont get any errors about a unsupported partition table type.
Assuming this works...
> cd /mnt
> ls
(This wont show much, but it proves you can run commands on that filesystem)
> df -h

This will output a lot of lines of stuff.. but somewhere you should see a line
that says /mnt 6TB (or approximately, maybe 5.95TB)

If all that works, you can use the entire disk in GPT mode.
If not... we can try to create a DOS partition table.
and make a 2 TB partition and see if that works.
 
Thank you dos2unix.
Assuming this will work, how do I Label each Drive with a Users Name, for use in Nextcloud 16. Cheers.
 

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