The fdisk command only supports the legacy MBR partition table format (also known as msdos partition table)
MBR
partition table do not support disks greater than 2.1TB, and therefore
fdisk is also unable to create partition tables on these devices.
Note that some older versions of fdisk may permit a larger size to be created but the resulting partition table will be invalid.
The parted command can create disk labels using MBR (msdos), GUID Partition Table (GPT), SUN disk labels and many more types.
The
GPT disk label overcomes many of the limitations of the DOS MBR
including restrictions on the size of the disk, the size of any one
partition and the overall number of partitions.
Note that
booting from a GPT labelled volume requires firmware support and this
is not commonly available on non-EFI platforms (including x86 and
x86_64 architectures).
