Possible to format and use 4TB USB drive in CentOS 5?

[Sotnec]

I have a Seagate 4TB USB drive which came preformatted in NTFS. I want to reformat this drive to ext3 and use it in CentOS 5.8. However based on reading I've done, I think it's not possible? Can someone confirm whether that can be done? Please note I'm referring to a USB drive and not a SATA connected drive.

In Windows, the USB drive reports it has 4K physical sectors and 4K logical sectors which apparently is not compatible with RHEL/CentOS 4 and 5: https://access.redhat.com/site/document ... /ch03.html

That doc refers to disks and I'm using attached storage through USB so I'm wondering if that still applies? From further digging around, it appears the drive inside actually uses 512B sectors but Seagate USB's interface emulates a 4K drive and that's why it shows up as 4K in Windows.

[gerald_clark]

It is a 4K sector drive. You need to use parted not fdisk. You will not be able to boot from it, but you can use it for storage

man parted

[TrevorH]

I've read reports of problems with USB attached drives > 2TB in the past. Never worked out what the cause was.