How to Format External 3TB Hard Drive as ext4 via Command Line (CLI)?

Question

I know there are several similar questions out there, but many of the answers are terrible.

I guess fdisk can NOT support drives larger than 2TB? The interactive menu changed on me so I don't know what to do now. It asks me for first cylinder and last cylinder. I just want to make the whole thing ext4 for backups of my ubuntu box.

I don't understand why I can't get a filesystem on my hard drive. This is the output of sudo parted -l after I complete the first trial.

# Install gdisk
sudo apt-get install gdisk

# Partition the external hard drive
sudo parted -l        # inspect your drive's name and make sure it is the external one!
sudo umount /dev/sdx1 # ensure that drive is NOT mounted
sudo gdisk /dev/sdx1  # launch gdisk on the drive of interest
?       # explore the features gdisk offers
n       # create a [n]ew partition
[enter] # choose default partition number
[enter] # choose default first sector
[enter] # choose default last sector
[enter] # choose default, linux filesystem (8300)
v       # verify
c       # change the name of the partition, e.g. MY_BACKUP_3TB
p       # print to ensure the renaming is to your liking
w       # write the changes to disk

# Reboot (got warning that I needed to so kernal can recognize the change)
sudo reboot

# Format the hard drive
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdx1 # create the filesystem as type ext4

# Inspect the results
sudo parted -l

Solution

If you performed the steps you listed, then you have a filesystem on the drive. parted doesn't show it because the drive uses 4k sectors, and parted currently only detects filesystems on disks with 512 byte sectors.

Comments

[tarabyte]

no access to GUI. I'll make that clearer in the question. This is a Ubuntu Server box.