I didn’t realise that one couldn’t use fdisk to create a partition larger than 2TB on Linux, until I was banging my head wondering why commands that I’ve used before did not work.

*Update&: apparently, fdisk does support GPT, using g. Oh well…

It seems that the solution is GPT: GUID Partition Table. And fdisk can’t do that (as far as I can tell).

But parted can. As, it seems, can an alternative to fdisk called gdisk.

Here’s what worked for me.

This is assuming that you are working with the disk /dev/sdb

Check that it is the disk you are expecting:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Install parted:

sudo apt install parted -y

Wipe the old file system:

sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdb

Run parted:

sudo parted /dev/sdb

Within parted, to create a partition using all available space, run:

mklabel gpt

unit TB

mkpart primary 0 0

quit

Once done, reload parted and, within parted, run:

print

After that, you can create a file system on it.