Unicorn HDD

[ArchBeekeeper]

How is it that I have a HDD with a msdos partition table AND it's also larger than 2TB!?!?!?

I can't properly clone it as a result.

Super stumped...Tried dd, but that didn't work.

How do you copy the impossible?!?!?!


Thanks in advance; I really am stumped here.

[MintBean]

What's this say?
sudo parted -l

[ArchBeekeeper]

Thanks!

Code: Select all

Model: Seagate Expansion Desk (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 4001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 2      1049kB  1049GB  1049GB  primary  ext4
 1      1049GB  4001GB  2952GB  primary  ext4

[Mute Ant]

An MBR partition table is limited to 32-bit unsigned integers to describe...
o The position of the first sector of a partition.
o The number of sectors in a partition.

A drive like yours has sectors 4096 bytes in length, so MBR is good for one-or-more partitions in a 16TiB space.

A BIOS or boot-loader or OS or partition-editor that simply assumes the sectors are 512 bytes long will have problems. GNU commands like dd don't see sectors though, just a sequence of bytes. All the normal disk-copy methods will work, except...
4001GB at 100MB/s -----> 11 hours
...so something like the ddrescue command, which can be restarted if you are cloning, or a backup of files instead to skip the empty spaces.