fdisk influence on EBS gp2 type

Question

Hello AWS Community,

I need your assistance. Today I met with the statement that creating partitions on EBS drives with fdisk utility is bad practice. I tried to find information about it on the Internet but couldn't find  anything...

Short story about a situation. I added a new EBS drive (230 Gb) to the server. Then I used fdisk to create only one partition on it. After that, I created ext4 file system on it. As a result, I was told I shouldn't use fdsik because it's bad practice to create such big partitions and it has no sense.

Please, could you explain to me why it is bad practice? What did I have to do? Maybe the problem is with fdisk utility?

Thank you so much! Really appreciate your help!

Accepted Answer

Hi There

This is probably in reference to the fact that fdisk traditionally only supports MBR partitions (which have a limit of 2TB) although some fdisk utilities do support GPT.  Take a look at this post in the RedHat forums: https://learn.redhat.com/t5/Platform-Linux/Partitioning-using-fdisk-vs-gdisk/td-p/1826

Here are the AWS instructions for making an EBS volume available for Linux instances.  You can create the filesistem directly on the block device using `mkfs`

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html

If you want to create partitions, you can use gdisk (basically newer version of fdisk)

See https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/create-lv-on-ebs-partition

fdisk influence on EBS gp2 type

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