How about the data already written to the unpartitioned disk?
It doesn't sound like either of the paths gives me any hope.
I don't care about the data or wiping the drive later as soon as I copy
existing content over to WS 2019 local NTFS drive.
But I can't afford to spend 3 days again processing and writing it.
The NVMe is needed for something else.
Gparted seems to recognise the fact that 53% of space has data written
to it. It also knows about the extfat system.
This morning, when I viewed the drive through gparted on a new machine
for the first time, it specifically complained about exfatprogs missing
and told me to install it.
I'm also wondering why a lack of partition wasn't reported in earlier
stages and I managed to mount /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1 and write to it?
On 20/01/2025 12:15, Greg Wooledge wrote:
You're trying to mount an entire disk, but that disk has an msdos
partition table with*no* partitions.
There are several problems here:
1) An msdos partition table only supports disks up to 2 TB and yours
is 4 TB.
2) You didn't create any partitions.
3) You didn't create an exfat file system, either on the raw device or
on a partition.
My advice would be:
1) Put a GPT partition table on the disk instead of msdos.
2) Create a single partition that spans all the usable space.
3) Create an exfat file system on that partition.
After that, you should be able to mount /dev/sdb1 wherever you like.
An alternative path would be:
1) Create an exfat file system on the raw device (/dev/sdb).
2) Mount /dev/sdb directly.
I don't think this is wise, simply because it may lead to surprises
in the future, when you forget that you've done it this way, or when
someone else tries to use this disk and expects it to have partitions.
However, it*is* a choice that you could make.
