New 3tb hdd thinks it's 801.6 GB

[Tim]

On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 23:04 -0700, George R Goffe wrote:

> I'm more than a little confused. I got a new 3tb seagate hdd and
> typo'd by placing a filesystem on /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdc1. Now
> the drive thinks it's a 801.6 GB. At least this is what fdisk -l
> reports.
>
> Some questions:
>  
> 1) how do I "fix" this?
> 2) do I really need to fix this?
> 3) what did I wipe out by the typo?

Well, if you haven't put any files on, and are just going to restart
setting up your drive, it will be fairly easy.

With fdisk, you could erase partitions and start again.  Just look at
the menu of options, and find the appropriate one.

If you're not using fdisk, or can't find a suitable erase partition
option, you could zero out the first few blocks of the drive, using
"dd", then any partitioning tool that you use will view the drive as a
complete blank, and let you start again.  You could copy probably about
4kb of null data from /dev/zero using the dd command.  Perhaps twice
that amount to be doubly sure.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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