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I'm trying to create a partition on a RHEL 6.3 machine, but parted is giving me the following error:

$ sudo parted /dev/vdb mkpart logical 1
Error: partition length of 6442450944 sectors exceeds the loop-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295

An alternate command for creating a partition gave me the same error:

$ sudo parted -s /dev/vdb mkpart primary 0GB 3298GB
Error: partition length of 6442450944 sectors exceeds the loop-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295

This is the fdisk output:

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/vdb

Disk /dev/vdb: 3298.5 GB, 3298534883328 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6391320 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

I've googled the error, but nothing useful came up. It's a 3TB disk, not a RAID array.

Leo
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    (FYI if you google `Error: partition length of sectors exceeds the loop-partition-table-imposed maximum of` you do get some useful results.) – Jay Apr 29 '13 at 20:03
  • Thanks! My mistake was removing the first number but not the second from the search query, which got me 30 results of people having trouble with mdadm/software RAID. – Leo Apr 30 '13 at 13:42

1 Answers1

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This error means that you can't create a partition of more than 2 TiB on an MBR-partitioned disk. You must use GPT partitioning.

To resolve the issue, create the GPT first:

parted /dev/vdb mklabel gpt

Then continue with your partitioning as normal.

Michael Hampton
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  • Thanks! That got me past the error. The parted commands (print, mkpart) work after this is done. – Leo Apr 30 '13 at 13:41