Formatting a 3TB harddisk to NTFS

Question

I've just installed a new harddisk in my desktop for data storage, I want to format it with NTFS*. I first tried disk utility and gparted to format the volume, but using both I get:

"Filesystem not clean"

and

"Device is mounted and no online capability in fsck tool for file system"

How can I create a 3TB NTFS partition?

* I want it to be usable across multiple platforms in the future, so this seems sensible, but perhaps it is not the best choice...

Answer 1

The gparted partition editor, asks you to select a partition table, (importantly!) don't use the default when it shows an WARNING message, select Advanced and choose GPT (rather than the default MSDOS).

The MSDOS partition table has a maximum partition length (2.2TB):

Create Primary Partition #1 (ntfs, 2.73 TiB) on /dev/sdd 00:00:00 ( ERROR )

create empty partition 00:00:00 ( ERROR ) libparted messages ( INFO )

partition length of 5860530176 sectors exceeds the msdos-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295

The GPT's maximum is 9.4ZB, since this is larger than 3TB you should no longer get this error.