3 TB disk troubles

[Thomas Mueller]

>      I recently bought a 3 TB external hard drive.  I attached it to the
> Firewire (400) bus and waited for my 8.2-STABLE i386 system to recognize it.
> After a small flurry of Firewire protocol messages, the kernel eventually
> said,
        
> Feb 12 23:35:42 hellas kernel: da2 at sbp0 bus 0 scbus0 target 1 lun 0
> Feb 12 23:35:42 hellas kernel: da2: <Initio INIC-1615P 0101> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
> Feb 12 23:35:42 hellas kernel: da2: 50.000MB/s transfers
> Feb 12 23:35:42 hellas kernel: da2: 2861588MB (5860533167 512 byte sectors: 255H
 63S/T 364801C)

> So far, so good, I thought.
>      Next I tried to use gpart(8) to set up a partition table.  However,
> gpart, gpte (from sysutils/gpte), diskinfo(8), et al. only see the device
> as a 2 TB drive.
        
> hellas# diskinfo -v /dev/da2
> /dev/da2
>         512             # sectorsize
>         2199023253504   # mediasize in bytes (2T)
>         4294967292      # mediasize in sectors
>         0               # stripesize
>         0               # stripeoffset
>         267349          # Cylinders according to firmware.
>         255             # Heads according to firmware.
>         63              # Sectors according to firmware.
>                         # Disk ident.
        
> hellas#

>      I have searched the archives of this list and several others, but
> haven't found anything helpful.  This disk is *not* intended as a boot
> disk, just data storage.  Is there any hope of using its full capacity?
> Or have I effectively bought an overpriced 2 TB drive?
>      Please Cc: me directly in any replies because I am subscribed to
> the digest form of this list and would like to see responses without
> having to wait up to 24 hours. :-)  Thanks in advance for any help!


>                                 Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG

There is Rod Smith's gdisk, a gpt counterpart of fdisk.

http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/

and available in FreeBSD ports collection, one version (0.8.5) behind Rod's current version 0.8.6.

This works for me.


Tom