Trouble creating fat32 partition larger than 1 TiB with gpt partition table using gparted

Question

I have a 6 TiB hard drive that I would like to make a fat32-partition on covering the whole hard drive. When trying to do so using gparted (first creating a gpt partition table, and then trying to create a 6TiB fat32 partition) it does not work.

gparted instead creates a partition of 1.46 TiB and the rest of the drive is unused with a warning label that says:

4.00 TiB of unallocated space within the partition.
To grow the file system to fill the partition, 
select the partition and choose the menu item:
Partition --> Check.

When trying to run Partition --> Check gparted crashes after displaying the following message:

Libparted Bug Found!
Attempt to write sectors
2861300-2861363 outside of partition on U[X].

I have no trouble creating a 6TiB partition using ext4 instead of fat32 but since I want to access the disk from both ubuntu and windows I would rather use fat32.

Also here is the output of "sudo fdisk -l" after trying to doing the fat32 partition:

Disk /dev/sdb: 6001.2 GB, 6001175126016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 729601 cylinders, total 11721045168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1  4294967295  2147483647+  ee  GPT
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

Thank you!

Answer 1

gParted will NOT let you format a disk beyond the limits of that filesystem. fat32 is not the correct filesystem for this (32 Gb is the max volume size). It probably is exFat you need (Windows will silently format it into exFat and call it fat32) exFat is not supported in gParted.

fat32 is obsolete. Prone to filesystem errors and it is slow.

I have no trouble creating a 6TiB partition using ext4 instead of fat32 but since I want to access the disk from both ubuntu and windows I would rather use fat32.

Ever heard of NTFS? Is supported by both Windows and Ubuntu (Linux in general even).

Answer 2

According to Wikipedia, the maximum size of FAT32 on a disk with 512-byte sectors is 2TB. Taking that literally, it works out to 1.8TiB; but I suspect 2TiB was actually meant. Either way, that's still larger than what you're getting, but it's at least in the same ballpark. It could be that mkdosfs and related tools in Linux have a bug or intentional limit that's a bit lower than the technical limit in FAT; or the Wikipedia article might be wrong.

What is the intended purpose of this partition? Chances are some other filesystem would be a better choice. If you intend to share it with Windows, NTFS is a good option. For sharing with OS X, I'd go with HFS+. For Linux-only use, use a Linux-specific filesystem, such as ext4fs or XFS. (Do not use NTFS for a Linux-only application; there are no useful NTFS repair tools in Linux, so when the filesystem develops problems, you'll have no way to fix them.) If you really must use FAT, you'll need to use multiple partitions and spread your files across them.

As a side note, fdisk is the wrong tool to use to display GPT data; you should use gdisk or parted instead. (This has changed with recent versions of fdisk, but Ubuntu 14.04 still uses an old GPT-unaware version of fdisk.)