var\messages full of sfdisk warnings about 4TB disk

[RoyGBiv]

Using SSH, went to look at var\messages - and found it packed full of messages:
Warning: dev/sdq contains GPT signatures

sdq is a 4TB external disk, partitioned with MBR and formated as 2TB NTFS. This because DSM5.2 insisted the the GPT partition was usbshare1, and the simple solution of renaming the shares didn't seem to work.

parted reports a 4TB disk, and filestation reports 1.25TB used of 2TB. It seems to be working, but I've got other problems (DSM 5.2 won't shutdown) which lead me to want to look at var\messages -- which is so full of sfdisk messages that I can't see anything else.

Deleting everything on the 4TB disk is sort of possible: what should I do to stop sfdisk spamming var\messages?

 

[Rusty]

Deleting everything on the 4TB disk is sort of possible: what should I do to stop sfdisk spamming var\messages?

Depends on the need for that drive on other devices apart from your NAS. Where do you use that drive? On what OS and file system types?

 

[RoyGBiv]

It has an NTFS volume on an external USB2 disk: the volume needs to be NTFS to make it available on (mostly) random Windows.
Since it only has a 2TB volume, and less than half of that matters, it would be possible to copy that off, and delete the volume and re-partition: the *only* problem is that, as an external USB2 disk, that would take a big chunk of a day.

If the problem is only a matching signature in some list in DSM, perhaps it would be easier to amend that config file. If the problem is only garbage in the config area of the disk, perhaps re-writing the MBR could clear it.