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I bought a Wester Digital Green 5TB harddisk and have difficulties to format it.

fdisk -l shows the following message:

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sde'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sde: 5001.0 GB, 5000981078016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 608001 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 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/sde1               1      267350  2147483647+  ee  GPT
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

I found similar questions but all addressing MBR disks, I did not find a solution for the message with a GPT disk.

Based on this post about 4K sectors I thought that I have to create the partition with gdisk starting on sector 4096 but this did not change anything.

gdisk /dev/sde: 9767541168 sectors, 4.5 TiB
Disk identifier (GUID): C6E7C7FB-4499-4E69-8D98-B1E79F22D219
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 9767541134
Total free space is 4062 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            4096      9767541134   4.5 TiB     0700  Linux/Windows data

Any help is very appreciated.

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    Try running parted -l on listing those partitions. fdisk doesn't list GPT partitions correctly.
    – Terrance
    Mar 25, 2016 at 20:22
  • Default is that start is 2048. The protective MBR in gpt partitioning is just there to warn you that drive is partitioned when you use old MBR tools like fdisk. New version of fdisk in 16.04 does correctly show gpt partitions. See askubuntu.com/questions/201164/…
    – oldfred
    Mar 25, 2016 at 22:24

1 Answer 1

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Your output shows two warnings, one of which is important and the other of which is irrelevant. The first warning is:

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sde'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

The second warning is:

Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

The first warning is the important one -- the version of fdisk that ships with Ubuntu 14.04 is useless on GPT disks, which your disk is. You can therefore safely ignore the second warning. Instead, use GParted, parted, or gdisk to partition the disk. The gdisk output you showed clearly identifies the first partition as starting on sector 4096, which is reasonable for almost all disks in use today, including (AFAIK) all disks with capacities in the ~5TB range.

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