Partitioning and Formatting a 3TB Harddrive as NTFS within Ubuntu

I bought a new harddrive since the old one was running out of space, its a Western Digital 3TB Green Harddrive. All my previous harddrives were 2TB or less, this is the first time I've tried a 2TB and I had to do a bit of research to make sure that the harddrive would work under linux and it can support a 3TB harddrive.

The first and important step is the consideration of partition and file system. Since this is a large harddrive, and since I have a number of computers with all different flavors of OSs - most importantly the Windows machines. I've decided to apply a single ntfs partition.

first steps first, I need partition tool such as gparted and some ntfs tools. To get these apt-get them and get them installed:

sudo apt-get install gparted
sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Now that these are installed, open up Gparted from the application launcher.

Once you open Gparted it will automatically show you /dev/sda, since this is most likely not your prefered device to format select the correct device from the top right hand corner, in my case it's /dev/sde

Since this is an empty new harddrive the entire block is in the shade of grey and it states that it is unallocated. Before you get stuck into creating partitions, you first need a partition table. To create a partition table click on Device > Create Partition Table.

You will be prompted to select a partition table type, it states that the default is MS-DOS partition, however, this has a limitation of 2TB partitions - since a 32bit field length is being used and with 512 byte sectors this equates to 2TB. In order to get to the something higher than 2TB we need to select GPT as our partition table type, to do this click on the arrow next to Advanced this will reveal a drop down, from there select GPT. To learn more about GPT click here. Click Apply to continue.

After you click apply you might start to hear your harddrive spin up, the partition table should take less than a second to create. After which your devices are rescanned and you will be left back on /dev/sde or your selected device, except the the red icon will no longer be there under Partition.

Now you would need to create one or more partitions, to do this right click on the grey block (where it sez unallocated) and click on New within the context menu.

You'll be presented with a box where you can select :

• Free space preceeding (MiB): This is the start, since I'm creating it from scratch the lowest I can go is 1 
• New size (MiB): The size of the partition, since I'm creating one big partition this will be the maximum for my 3TB which is 2861587
• Free space following (MiB): This is the end of the partition, since I'm taking up all the space it will be 0 for me
• Align to: You can slect MiB which is easier to comprehend, or Cylinder, or none
• Create as: You can create the partition as a Primary Partition, Logical Partition or an Extended Partition
• File system: Here is where you can set it to NTFS, there are a number of options and since this post is about NTFS I'll only cover that option
• Label: Here you can enter a label for your new partition like "myNewPart" or what ever will describe the partition for you. 

Once you have entered everything the way you want click on Add to continue. The following options are what I had selected:

Once you have clicked on Add, you'll be dropped back on to the main screen of Gparted.

At this stage it's not too late to back out, if you want to back out click on the orangy-red back button just under the Parition menu. Otherwise if you are comfortable to continue click on the green tick that's under the Help menu.

Since this is a risky operation, make sure that you have any data backed up when you are playing around with partitions and formatting. Once you have completed all the tasks its very difficult to back out. You'll be presented with a final confirmation asking whether to proceed or not.

If you are uncomfortable to proceed click on cancel and back out now! Otherwise, click on Apply to continue.

This will then cycle through for a little while:

Once it is done you'll be given a success message, click on Close to continue:

All done.

Now since I'm a skeptic  at times I normally test it to make sure that it works. So mount up the drive via Nautilus and create a text file to see if it works.

Now it's done.