Big ext3 partitions in openSUSE 10.2

I realize this is a pretty niche topic but spent several hours today trying to figure out how to create a couple 3.4TB ext3 partitions in openSUSE servers and wanted to share what worked.

The biggest tip is don’t try to use the openSUSE installer to partition and/or format the big partition. In my case it screwed things up no matter how I attempted to tweak settings. One sequence that does work is this:

• Install openSUSE, but don’t touch the big disk (i’ll call it /dev/sdb for this post).
• Once installed, login as root and run parted /dev/sdb. This is a great tool that I only discovered today. This page provides a good overview plus documentation and the help system in the tool pretty much tells you anything you need to know.
• From the parted prompt type mklabel gpt.
• Type mkpart primary start end. This creates a primary partition beginning at ‘start’ and ending at ‘end’. These can be fixed MB amounts or percentages. In my case this was mkpart primary 0 100%. This creates just the partition, it does not setup a file system. In this example the new partition would be /dev/sdb1.
• Type quit. The parted tool has great commands for making file systems as well but they don’t support ext3.
• Now back at a regular prompt type mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1, let it crank for awhile, and you’ll have your big ext3 partition. The -b argument is specifying the block size. ext3 maximum size is determined by block size, more information on the wikipedia page.
• Mount the file system to wherever you want and add the relevant entry to /etc/fstab

Hopefully this will save somebody else a couple hours – the key in my case was to not let the openSUSE installer play any role in setting up the partition.