[Lugstuff] 4TB external drive

[Norbert Zacharias]

Dear Linux user group,

I recently got a Western Digital 4TB Book external drive and have a
problem formatting it.  Plugging into a Mac it shows 4 trillion available
bytes and by a click with the mouse it formats the 3.6 TB (2 internal drives)
as a single partition.  That, of course is not readable by Linux.

Running RHEL, after plugging into the USB port the  dmesg  shows a
"very big device" but can't determine properly its size.  I was told
to put a GPT system on.  fdisk is not supposed to work while parted
should.  With parted I can make a GPT lable, but my computer "sees"
only about 2 TB max, I can't even create a 3TB partition.

Here is the extract from dmesg:

input: Western Digital My Book as /class/input/input17
input: USB HID v1.11 Device [Western Digital My Book] on usb-0000:00:0a.1-7
 Vendor: WD        Model: My Book           Rev: 1015
 Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 04
sdf : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16).
sdf : READ CAPACITY(16) failed.
sdf : status=0, message=00, host=5, driver=00
sdf : use 0xffffffff as device size
SCSI device sdf: 4294967296 512-byte hdwr sectors (2199023 MB)
sdf: Write Protect is off
sdf: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
sdf : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16).
sdf : READ CAPACITY(16) failed.
sdf : status=0, message=00, host=5, driver=00
sdf : use 0xffffffff as device size
SCSI device sdf: 4294967296 512-byte hdwr sectors (2199023 MB)
sdf: Write Protect is off
sdf: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
sdf: unknown partition table
sd 19:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdf
sd 19:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
 Vendor: WD        Model: My Book Device    Rev: 1015
 Type:   Enclosure                          ANSI SCSI revision: 04
scsi 19:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 13
usb-storage: device scan complete

Any suggestions?  Is there a newer version for "READ CAPACITY" ?
How can I make my computer detect the correct physical size of
that drive.  Having 2 internal drives instead of 1 does not seem
to be an issue.  I can easily format a Western Digital Book 2TB
which has 2 x 1TB internally.  Even fdisk can make a 2TB partition
on such a unit. 

Norbert
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