Palimpsest will not properly format large (>2.2TB) drive

[RUSL Bicycle]

Hi,

I tried to format my new portable WD Green 3TB drive as a single ext4 partition using palimpsest. This it did and seemed to work on my local computer. However upon moving this drive another Ubuntu computer the device was unrecognised and threw up scary errors about superblocks missing. Upon further investigation I found that palimpsest had not partitioned the disk or partitioned the disk improperly. There is a more detailed account of the whole story here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1959986

Bug:
Palimpsest is not able to handle formatting a drive/partition larger than 2.2TB. I think that palimpsest created a MBR for the drive even though it is too big to use that and must use GPT (or something else) to work properly. OR it created no partition table. In any case the partition/filesystem structure was not proper and was unreadable to other systems. There was no notice from the program that the filesystem was being created in a non-standard way.

What should happen:
Palimpsest should create a GPT partition table for drive larger than 2.2TB. Perhaps this could be done by calling the program gdisk http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/index.html
Or, if that is unfeasible an error message should be shown indicating that this program cannot format larger than 2.2TB and that the user must make smaller partition or use something else (gdisk)

FYI
Linux 2.6.32-41-generic #89-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 27 22:18:56 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS \n \l
gnome-disk-utility: Installed: 2.30.1-1

The other laptop I was using that at first could not read the drive was also Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS but a 32bit Dell Inspiron 1450 laptop computer

The hard drive in question is Western Digital WDC WD30EZRS 3.0TB firmware 80.00A08
it is in a NextstarCX portable enclosure connected via eSATA to the 64bit system or USB for the Dell laptop

Thank You, let me know if you need any clarification.

Russell

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ryan Chaves (rchaves33)]

I have the same drive and the same problem.
This is a partial duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/802153 since misalignment is likely a result of the starting sector incorrectly set by palimpsest. I'm not an expert on this, though, and bug #802153 doesn't bring up the MBR vs. GUID aspect, so I hesitate to mark this officially as a duplicate. Would be nice to get some progress on this though, since it was reported over 1 year ago and 3TB drives w/ Advanced Format are becoming more common for better or worse.