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Studying for the RHCSA and I've been trying to find an answer to a question thats been stuck in my head...

My understanding is for MBR you can have a total of 4 partitions which each cant be > 2TiB... Now, say what if the total hard drive was 10 TiB and the first 3 partitions made up a total of 1 TiB... If your fourth partition is extended, can it be the remaining 9TiB as long as the logical partitions within are < 2 TiB? Or is the extended also limited to 2 TiB.

Someone responded with using parted, which has worked. However, I'm still curious regarding the limitations of extended partition with MBR.

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  • The design of the MBR allows for a maximum of 2^32 sectors. The commonly stated 2TiB limit is due to a sector size of 512 bytes, On disks with 4Kb sectors (such as Advanced Format 4Kn) the limit is 16TiB.
    – fpmurphy
    Nov 1, 2019 at 1:52

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The MBR partition scheme does not support more than 2 TiB on the disk total. Beyond this, an MBR cannot address any space on a hard disk; you'd be better off using a GPT partition table, especially if a system is running RHEL, unless you are in a special case where you know you need the MBR partition scheme, which is quite rare these days.

RHEL has support for GPT partitioning on both BIOS and UEFI-based systems; BIOS-based systems would use GRUB and a BIOS boot partition, while UEFI would work the same way as always.

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  • Thanks. Was curious if the extended could be larger as long as the logical partitions within were still < 2TiB
    – Strad
    Oct 29, 2019 at 11:47

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