It seems that for disks larger than the maximum size addressable by MBR sfdisk behaves oddly. I would have expected: echo "2048,,L" | sfdisk -uS --Linux $TARGET to put a 2TB partition on $TARGET if it was larger than 2TB. I suspect that the issue is the end sector that its trying to write overflowing an integer. I'll suggest that a better action would be to just end at 2TB. I don't think this is a terribly severe bug, or that my suggestion is the right way to fix it. Mostly I'm just reporting the odd/unexpected (to me) behavior. See below for example, the same is true on file or block device. Scott ---- $ rm -f /tmp/foo.img; truncate --size 2500G /tmp/foo.img $ echo "2048,,L" | sfdisk -uS --Linux /tmp/foo.img Warning: /tmp/foo.img is not a block device Disk /tmp/foo.img: cannot get geometry Disk /tmp/foo.img: 326354 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature /tmp/foo.img: unrecognized partition table type Old situation: No partitions found New situation: Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /tmp/foo.img1 2048 5242879999 5242877952 83 Linux /tmp/foo.img2 0 - 0 0 Empty /tmp/foo.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty /tmp/foo.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty Warning: no primary partition is marked bootable (active) This does not matter for LILO, but the DOS MBR will not boot this disk. Successfully wrote the new partition table Re-reading the partition table ... BLKRRPART: Inappropriate ioctl for device If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1) to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1 (See fdisk(8).) $ sfdisk -uS -l /tmp/foo.img Disk /tmp/foo.img: cannot get geometry Disk /tmp/foo.img: 326354 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /tmp/foo.img1 2048 947912703 947910656 83 Linux /tmp/foo.img2 0 - 0 0 Empty /tmp/foo.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty /tmp/foo.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
