I took a new 1TB laptop disk and fired up an MGA cauldron repair disk to write an MSDOS MBR and then do the following partition assignments: 50G primary ext4 50G primary ext4 50G primary ext4 extended 24G swap 16G ext4 128G ext4 rest (about 613G) ext4 When it came to the last partition, fdisk would only give it 8GB. Using anything larger cause a value out of range error. The total that fdisk would allow was 326GB, which isn't anywhere near the 1TB capacity, and well under the 2TB limit of the MSDOS partition table architecture. For anyone with a 1 TB disk, this ought to be easy to reproduce. Just do what I did and be damn careful not to issue a "w" command :-)
Also of interest, diskdrake had no problem taking the resulting disk, deleting the 8GB partition, and defining a partition to use the entire rest of the disk.
Assigning to maintainer and CC'ing "basesystem group" maintainers
CC: (none) => basesystem, marja11Assignee: bugsquad => tmbSource RPM: fdisk => util-linux
fdisk has some known limitations. For this disk you should probably use something like parted (or diskdrake which is based on the same underlying code).
I made it work by using fdisk to write the MSDOS MBR and then diskdrake to create the partitions. The problem is that diskdrake won't write an MBR and fdisk (which I think is all we supply on the rescue disk) won't create all of the partitions. Not intuitive.
What size did you use for the extended partition? That seems to be the problem $ dd if=/dev/zero of=1T.img bs=1M seek=$(expr 1024 '*' 1023 + 1023) count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1048576 bytes (1.0 MB, 1.0 MiB) copied, 0.000761003 s, 1.4 GB/s $ /sbin/fdisk 1T.img Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.28.2). Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. Be careful before using the write command. Device does not contain a recognized partition table. Created a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x5ff93de7. Command (m for help): n Partition type p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free) e extended (container for logical partitions) Select (default p): Using default response p. Partition number (1-4, default 1): First sector (2048-2147483647, default 2048): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2048-2147483647, default 2147483647): +50G Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 50 GiB. Command (m for help): n Partition type p primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free) e extended (container for logical partitions) Select (default p): p Partition number (2-4, default 2): First sector (104859648-2147483647, default 104859648): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (104859648-2147483647, default 2147483647): +50G Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 50 GiB. Command (m for help): Command (m for help): n Partition type p primary (2 primary, 0 extended, 2 free) e extended (container for logical partitions) Select (default p): Using default response p. Partition number (3,4, default 3): First sector (209717248-2147483647, default 209717248): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (209717248-2147483647, default 2147483647): +50G Created a new partition 3 of type 'Linux' and of size 50 GiB. Command (m for help): n Partition type p primary (3 primary, 0 extended, 1 free) e extended (container for logical partitions) Select (default e): e Selected partition 4 First sector (314574848-2147483647, default 314574848): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (314574848-2147483647, default 2147483647): Created a new partition 4 of type 'Extended' and of size 874 GiB. Command (m for help): n All primary partitions are in use. Adding logical partition 5 First sector (314576896-2147483647, default 314576896): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (314576896-2147483647, default 2147483647): +24G Created a new partition 5 of type 'Linux' and of size 24 GiB. Command (m for help): n All primary partitions are in use. Adding logical partition 6 First sector (364910592-2147483647, default 364910592): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (364910592-2147483647, default 2147483647): +16G Created a new partition 6 of type 'Linux' and of size 16 GiB. Command (m for help): n All primary partitions are in use. Adding logical partition 7 First sector (398467072-2147483647, default 398467072): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (398467072-2147483647, default 2147483647): +128G Created a new partition 7 of type 'Linux' and of size 128 GiB. Command (m for help): n All primary partitions are in use. Adding logical partition 8 First sector (666904576-2147483647, default 666904576): Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (666904576-2147483647, default 2147483647): Created a new partition 8 of type 'Linux' and of size 706 GiB. Command (m for help): p Disk 1T.img: 1 TiB, 1099511627776 bytes, 2147483648 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x5ff93de7 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type 1T.img1 2048 104859647 104857600 50G 83 Linux 1T.img2 104859648 209717247 104857600 50G 83 Linux 1T.img3 209717248 314574847 104857600 50G 83 Linux 1T.img4 314574848 2147483647 1832908800 874G 5 Extended 1T.img5 314576896 364908543 50331648 24G 83 Linux 1T.img6 364910592 398465023 33554432 16G 83 Linux 1T.img7 398467072 666902527 268435456 128G 83 Linux 1T.img8 666904576 2147483647 1480579072 706G 83 Linux Command (m for help):
CC: (none) => pterjan
Hmm, possibly, but I don't remember giving a size for the extended and I don't see why fdisk would max out at 365G (or so) on a 1TB disk. The first extended partition was the 24G swap, and I don't see the correlation. But if you can't reproduce, I'll close as WORKSFORME and wait till the next time.
Closing, since there hasn't been a "next time".
Status: NEW => RESOLVEDResolution: (none) => FIXED