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!

Matt-B · 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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